


Smoke and Fire

by Freyjabee



Category: Original Work
Genre: Dark Fantasy, Dark Magic, Drug Use, F/M, Fantasy, Magic, Romance, Steampunk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-13
Updated: 2019-09-25
Packaged: 2019-11-16 10:50:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 26,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18092885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Freyjabee/pseuds/Freyjabee
Summary: Orphan Asha has a secret that a lot of people would kill for. Runaway Joan is a thief without much to live for.  They belong together like smoke and fire.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! This story is going to be a quick three-shot, I think, posted for free because I’m new to this Patreon and original works business and thought this would be a good way for us to get to know one another. Asha and Joan are two supporting characters from my novel (available on Amazon) The Abolition of Caden Hail. This is their origins.

Every Thursday evening, after a modest dinner of turnip soup was eaten and the dishes were washed, Asha would shimmy down the trellis outside her window at His House of Perpetual Peace, the church she called home, and stroll through the lower middle-class portion of Ester. 

Beneath the lambent moon, it was easier to imagine in which house her real parents lived. The one with the ceramic gargoyle in the garden? Next door, with the enclosed sunroom? Or how about the one with the beat up cart chained up out front and the sad, skinny horse standing listlessly in its lean-to on the small strip of land in the back? 

She suspected Father Brant knew exactly which house she’d been ejected from at the ripe age of two _,_ but his memory was going, his thoughts dissolving like too much sugar in tea. Granules would be left behind, a few memories for him to reflect on, but they could be found in the dregs, what most people would cast aside. She told herself not to get too frustrated on the days when he’d forget her face and she felt truly unwanted. He never would have told her his secrets anyway; his priest’s robes kept him choked.

Her favourite house to fantasize about was a tired white brick monster, its gabled roof like sagging shoulders, its windows heavy-lidded eyes. 

One of the houses across the street had a rain barrel they kept near the edge of their property, out from beneath the stretch of a massive oak tree. Asha leaned against it to watch the people in what she’d come to think of as _her_ house. They moved behind blue lace curtains, a woman standing at what Asha imagined was a sink and a man that came and went behind her, taking plates off a table or baby toys for her to wash. He put a kiss on her cheek the final time he appeared and Asha’s heart panged with longing. 

 _If one of the Gods came down and gave you that very life, would you be satisfied?_  

She feared the truth, she didn’t belong to a scene like that, she belonged to the dusty attic of the church on the edge of the slums, to the dark alleys of Wallace Avenue, and the shadows of Rose Boulevard, where she could spy poor but happy people with their poor but happy family. She belonged with Father Brant, who had done the best he could by her for as many years as he’d been able. She belonged with Bjorn, another orphan, who was almost like an older brother, though only nice to her when the lights got dim and he got to drinking.

Next door, a window shattered and voices bled into the night, screams, a man and a woman and someone caught between adolescence and adulthood. They were the raw kind of mad that only families could be. The kind of mad that cut deep to the bone. Bar fights and jealous lovers’ squabbles had nothing on this fury.

The front door burst open and a gangly boy stumbled out. One side of his face was swollen and his shirt clung to him, wet with spilled beer; Asha could smell it on the air. A tall man chased after him with a butcher’s knife raised. They were almost spitting images of each other, thin cheeks and noses, low brows, high foreheads. Their hair was different, though. The man’s was dark brown, the boy had dyed his the green of the forest, probably with fabric dye or something else equally toxic to get that dark, rich colour.

The father screamed, spittle flying from his mouth, eyes two narrow slits. His voice was pitched in such a way that Asha couldn’t even understand what he was saying, beyond _money_. That was easy, though, everyone always fought about that.

The boy ran faster than his father and after a few hundred metres, the older man gave up. He huffed and swivelled back around on his heel, returning to his house. He caught sight of Asha staring and sneered. “What are you looking at, gutter rat?”

“Nothing,” she said immediately. Her face felt hot.

“That’s right, or you’ll get your fucking eyes cut out.”

Asha pretended she didn’t exist, sliding back into the shadow of a broken streetlamp. She heard the front door slam and felt the man’s poisonous presence evaporate and she could breathe easier. 

The fun of pretend had evaporated. The night felt pregnant with apprehension now; she wanted out of there. She didn’t want to go back to the church, though. Climbing into her window was always harder than climbing out. 

She walked Ester’s streets without purpose. Her heart was beating fast and her thoughts kept circling around the man’s threatening glare, scared of him and somehow longing for that fear, too. Asha tried to dissect the feeling. It went against everything Father Brant had taught her about goodness. But she _wanted_ it. She wanted it the way she wanted breath because if she had someone like that, he’d be screaming at her, yes, but at least she’d _have_ someone _to_ scream at her. 

That was a frightening revelation. Desperate people wanted that. Lonely people. She never suspected she was either.

She passed over the bridge that spanned Silver River, where Eugene, the spelled stone gargoyle perched. When the bridge was first created, Ester’s government told its mages to make it something unique, to draw the tourists in. One mage came all the way from Summerlyn, Namaul’s capital, and bewitched Eugene so he’d recognize the first hundred people that introduced themselves to him. He’d say hi to them as they passed, his body moving like he was a real, living thing.

Asha had seen it twice, exactly. It was eerie.

Down the street, the door for Merle’s Apothecary shot open and a familiar head of green hair raced out. He had his arms full to the brim. So full, in fact, some of what he carried fell as he ran and rolled across the ground, stopping short against the raised garden out front of the store. Pill bottles, Asha realized, their amber sides reflecting back the ghostly moon.

The door opened again and an angry guard rushed out with his sidearm drawn. “Stop! Thief!”

She saw the rest in slow motion. The boy did not slow. The guard lifted his gun and fired. The shot split the night and the boy fell. His contraband scattered every which way. He struggled to get to his feet again and the guard aimed once more. 

Asha squeezed her eyes shut as tightly as she could and waited for the killing shot, and praying furiously that it would never come. She’d seen the life bleed out of Father Brant’s parishioners on their death beds when she accompanied him to bear witness to their final prayers, but she’d never seen something so violent before.

A strange, animalistic noise met Asha’s ears. She peeked between her lashes though she did not _want_ to, not really. The guard had fallen to his knees. He clutched his chest and wheezed and wheezed and wheezed, then hiccupped, spat up all of his dinner, and slumped forward into the mess. He didn’t move again.

The boy had managed to get to his feet and started to run jaggedly. He passed by Asha and barely spared her a second glance. The following silence was so profound, it reverberated like a plucked guitar string and Asha could not move. Then a carriage rolled by and that changed. She went to the guard and touched his neck. He was as dead as a gutted chicken and no amount of magic or praying would change that. Dead was dead. There were two victims, though.

She turned her attention out into the night and followed the dotted trail of blood without consideration for her safety. It was light at first but got heavy five hundred metres in. Then it swung into the bushes at Maple Park and Asha knew exactly where the boy was headed.

She kept suspecting she’d find his figure toppled in the grass but it wasn’t until she made it to the other side of the park, where the industrial district encroached on the green space, that she caught sight of him again. He’d made it to the abandoned factory on Lexie Street, but he was only halfway through the crack in the boarded up window, a leg on either side of the wall, his forehead resting against the busted window frame. He’d passed out.

She worried her lip, thinking, thinking. She should call the police. That’s what Father Brant would tell her. But if she called the police, the boy would probably die, either hung for his crimes or bled out because the police wouldn’t waste a healer on the likes of him.

 _So it’s up to you._  

Did she walk away knowing that he’d die, or did she try to do something about it?

_He’s just a thief._

And she was just a sobbing child wrapped in squalor when she was left on Father Brant’s doorstep. 

Huffing, she pushed him the rest of the way into the abandoned factory and followed. It was dark and stunk like piss and beer and garbage. Rotting wood and rotting clothes. Old bong water and animal waste. She only felt safer at the church.

Asha knelt beside the boy and touched his shoulder. Her gift was one Father Brant quietly praised in the days when he was still coherent enough to do so. Artnodeorum, he’d tell her, which translated roughly to touched by the gods. The slum’s best healer (an easy achievement when you were the only healer in the city.)

When he would preach, Father Brant would invite sick parishioners into the back of the church and have Asha lay her healer’s hands on them while he prayed. Sometimes, she could see into a person’s body and heal them proper. Sometimes, it was like reading an actual real-life book, the words all jumbled up on the page, not making any sort of sense. There was training to be had, of course, if she was willing to leave Father Brant behind and join Namaul’s military force. She was not a tool or a weapon, though. Besides, who would care for Father Brant? He had her. That was all. She owed him her time for his remaining days.

Asha found the spot where the boy had been shot in the back and reached out with her magic. It was like fumbling through the dark, looking for bleeds and tears and soothing them. She worked as best as she knew how. She’d never done anything like this before. The people that came to the church had diseases in their blood and in their mind, slow sicknesses she could learn and pick apart. This was trauma. His life was running out through her fingers and she had to work faster than she was comfortable, imagining the gunshot was a drain that needed plugging.

The going was slow. She worked for so long, her legs cramped, stitching here, mending there, fixing, fixing, fixing and hoping she wasn’t butchering. He kept breathing, though, so she assumed she was doing something right.

Sometime near dawn, her patient moaned lowly, startling Asha so badly, her concentration shattered. Her magic slipped away like a tide rushing from shore and she couldn’t get it back, not for anything. She felt ill, wrung out, lifeless, a cornstalk in the seconds before winter snatched it from autumn and sunk it into a deep freeze.

The wind whipped by so fiercely, it snuck through the gaps and holes in the factory walls. Asha shivered; if she was cold, the boy must have been freezing. She pulled him onto a dirty mat of clothes someone had left piled in the corner, away from the spot in the roof that dripped rainwater, then she undid her jacket so she could drape it over them both and joined him. 

She was asleep before she even rested her head and stayed that way long into the next day, when the sun was high overhead, behind a mat of grey clouds that threatened to dump winter’s first snow. 

The boy was awake. He was looking down at her and touching his side where the blood had dried into his T-shirt. The side of his face was still a massive bruise from his temple to his jaw; she hadn’t been able to heal that. “You’re a corporis,” he said matter-of-factly.

Being a mage of such power without allegiance in a city like Ester could be dangerous. Common folk would be frightened of her and the government would have her future planned out before she could blink. She found she trusted this boy, though. It was probably his dark eyes. They were the fooling kind, that could lull a girl in with a twinkle, should she want to be lulled. Asha always did. “My name is Asha.”

“Joan.” He offered her his calloused hand and she took it. She knew immediately they belonged together. The way smoke and fire did. They’d probably smother each other out, too, the way too much smoke and too much fire did. She was ready for it, though.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Hot soup sloshed over the rim of Asha’s chipped porcelain cup as she dodged a cart barreling down Lexie Street. She bit the inside of her lip and wiped the rapidly-cooling liquid on her pants. It wasn’t a terrible burn but more got on her hand when she stooped through the crack in the boarded door and came into the factory.

Joan waited for her, sitting on a pile of discarded clothes as he had every night for the last three days. He smiled impishly, pushing a pill bottle further into the depths of his makeshift bed; she smiled back and pretended not to notice. “It’s turnip soup again.”

“I don’t care.” He made room her. Asha sat in the must and the dust like it didn’t bother her. Joan took the soup from her with one hand and wrapped his other around her waist. He jittered as he sipped the hot liquid too fast.

“Aren’t you burning yourself?”

He acted like she hadn’t spoken. “This is great.”

It really wasn’t. He was just hungry. It was nice to be needed and complimented, though. She supposed Father Brant needed her, too, but this felt different. Joan didn’t need her to wipe his mouth or help him go to the bathroom. He needed her the way she needed him. Maybe.

“Do you think you’ll go home?” If he was going to leave her, it was best to know now, so she could prepare herself for the heartbreak.

Joan tipped the cup all the way back and used his finger to scrape out the remaining dregs of turnip. He chewed and swallowed before he answered. “I don’t have anything there, do I?”

She didn’t _know_ , he’d been pretty silent about everything that came before him robbing the apothecary. “You have a family…”

“What’s so great about that?”

“I don’t know,” she stammered. “I’ve never had one.” She’d only ever been Orphan Asha.

“My dad kicked the shit out of me and my mom watched.”

“Not every family is like that.”

“Not quite like that, no, I guess. But they’re all screwed up in some way. My brother’s friend fucked his dad’s girlfriend and got her pregnant. When he found out, he threw him in Silver River.” Where the waters ran through fields of Silver dragon, a plant that was deadly toxic to anyone with even a drop of magic in them.

“I knew a brother and sister that rolled a liquor store last year and when the cops showed up, the brother got away but the sister didn’t. He got one of his buddies to be an alibi and she got an extended sentence.”

“Really?”

“Swear to God,” he said with his hand over his heart. “Just because it’s your blood doesn’t mean nothing. Blood’s like anything else, it turns just as soon as it has a reason to.”

Asha was leaning into him, listening, without ever meaning to. He had a way of making her believe everything he said, a little bit of inflexion, some confidence, and her eighteen years of melancholy seemed like they hadn’t been worth much at all. And that was okay, somehow.

“You’re probably better off without them,” Joan finished. “Choose your own people.”

She had, in a way. Father Brant and Bjorn. And maybe…

Asha settled back against Joan. “We have another room available above the church. You don’t have to stay here.” It was starting to get really cold. He would freeze to death if he didn’t figure something out, and the youth shelters were hard to get into. Not only that, they didn’t leave much room for mistakes. A person could get kicked out for even one wrong move. Joan looked like he’d made a lifetime of them.

“How does that work?”

“You do some chores. You come to Sunday Mass. Then you’re a ward of the church.”

“Just like that?”

She shrugged. “That’s how it was for me.”

Asha already knew he was going to say yes, Joan had a look of desperation to him.

* * *

Father Brant was sitting at the scuffed kitchen table, eating a plate of mushy peas. Bjorn sat across from him, monitoring each squashed bulb that entered his toothless mouth. His nose curled in disgust when a half-chewed pea fell out onto Father Brant’s shirt, but when he noticed he had company, he smoothed his features and sat up straighter. “Who’s this?”

Asha avoided Bjorn’s gaze altogether, speaking only to Father Brant. “Father Brant, this is my friend Joan.”

Father Brant took another spoonful of peas and slipped it between his flat, purple-tinged lips without reply.

Asha forged ahead. “He needs a place to live; he can’t go home. I told him maybe he could stay here. With us. If that’s okay.”

“He’s been a vegetable all day,” Bjorn said, leaning back far enough that he could kick his feet up on the table. “Doesn’t speak, doesn’t hear, doesn’t see.”

Asha bit her lips together, waiting for Father Brant to tell him to take his feet down. He didn’t. “Is he okay?”

Bjorn shrugged and used two fingers to scoop out some peas from Father Brant’s bowl. He stuck them in his mouth and made a face. “That’s fucking disgusting.”

“Don’t eat his food,” Asha said with as much gusto as she ever scolded Bjorn with and waited for him to lash out.

He kicked his feet off the table and stood with practiced grace. He towered over her. Unlike Asha, he had no trouble meeting her eyes. She prepared herself for the worst when he put his arm out but he only slung it around her shoulders companionably and pulled her in close. His knuckles were blue and torn open. It looked fresh. “You’re right. I snagged some cash, you want to get some real food?”

“Did you get into a fight?” she asked.

“Yes, or no, Asha?”

“Yeah,” said Joan. Asha had almost forgotten he was there.

A millisecond passed in awkward silence, then Bjorn grinned and traded Asha for Joan. “Let’s go, brother.”

Asha lingered. She should stay here but… But she didn’t trust Bjorn with Joan. Not alone. She felt less guilty once the upstairs door was closed and she could no longer see the retired priest slouching despondently in front of his meager meal.

They went to a noodle place on South-Second and Bjorn bought for all of them. They ate indoors and received strange looks from the other customers. They didn’t belong in this part of town, those looks said, and they certainly didn’t belong in this restaurant, with Joan’s bloody and unwashed clothes, Bjorn’s ripped jeans and Asha’s partially shaved head and piercings.

Both Bjorn and Joan seemed immune to their gazes. Asha thrust them out of her mind as well and focused on eating. She almost never ate anything this complex in flavour, made with out-of-season vegetables and spices from across the Sapphire Sea. It was fantastic.

She ate as much as she possibly could and took the rest in a waxed cardboard container. Then they wandered around town, stopping in Maple Park, where the moon hung low in the sky and set ablaze the fields. It’d snowed recently and no one had walked through the park to leave tracks, making the landscape pristine.

Asha felt like she was in another world, skipping out into the centre of the field and spinning until she was dizzy and fell. She lay there, staring up at the stars and the swollen moon, thinking, _I could be happy like this._ If Bjorn stayed happy and Joan stayed. _This_ could be her family. She could stop wandering down to Rose Boulevard, marvelling at everything she didn’t have, and start focusing on what she _did._

She turned her head and watched Bjorn and Joan. They were still at the edge of the field. Joan reached into his coat and brought out a pill container. He opened it up and took out one for himself, then handed them over to Bjorn. Bjorn pulled him close and told him something in confidence that gave Joan pause. Asha wished she could hear what he said.

Joan put the pills back in his pocket and looked her way. He grinned like he’d just remembered she was there. Asha’s heart both leapt and plummeted. Bad things were coming her way. Bad things.

Joan settled down beside her, uncaring of the snow on his pants. “Do you want one?” He held out the pill bottle. It was almost empty.

Bad things. Asha let him put one of the pills on her tongue. It began to dissolve, along with her piety, if it’d ever existed at all.

She could suddenly feel _everything._ Winter’s wind on her nose, the snow leeching through her coat, Joan’s warm hands. She did what she wanted, reaching up and cradling his cheek. He smiled another impish, off-kilter smile before she met his lips. He was the second boy she’d ever kissed, the first was as skinny as a starving rat. She’d done it between the pews just before service started. His father saw and wanted them to do it again, a gleam in his eye that had scared her.

This was _nothing_ like that day. It was just her and Joan and the night. Bjorn had wended away, as he was prone to do, and she didn’t think she’d see him again until sunrise. She wrapped her arms around Joan’s neck and welcomed those bad things.


	3. Chapter 3

Sunday mornings were always hectic. Asha woke up extra early to make Father Brant’s breakfast and to help him get clean. She used to think she’d do his laundry and make dinner and Bjorn would shower and shave him and clean him after he used the washroom but Bjorn was not a natural caregiver. Asha took over last year when Father Brant got a bad rash in his armpits. It was a silent coup; Bjorn didn’t fight and Asha didn’t complain.

Father Brant’s best suit was older than Asha was by a lot. Its material was thin in spots, fading in others. The slacks were plain black, his vest maroon, ascot gold, like His cross. Father Brant’s overcoat matched his slacks and hung off his slight frame. She used to remember what it looked like on him when he was well but the passage of time had softened her memory. One day blurred into the next so it felt like there had always been a skeletal man with a skeletal smile waiting for her care.

“Use the pomade,” Father Brant demanded in his wispy way.

“I already put some in, Father.”

“Not enough you didn’t.”

She did. But she used more, whisking his hair back with her fingers. The little bathroom smelled like cedar.

“That’s a good girl.” He patted her hand with his liver-spotted one. What was it about the old that made them look spidery? His fingers could be spindle legs scratching at the air for webbing. Sometimes, they snuck into Asha’s dreams and tore her apart like she was made of tissue paper. When they were through, she was a stain of blood and that was all.

Asha swallowed down a lump of unrealistic and _unwarranted_ fear. A dream was a dream. It couldn’t hurt her. “We should go; the service will start soon.”

“I haven’t my book.”

“It’s okay,” Asha assured him. “I have it downstairs.” Another white lie. She’d tried to explain to him that he didn’t give the sermon anymore but he never seemed to remember until he was downstairs, sitting in a pew and looking at Father Springer as he recited the Lord’s Prayer from a bible much newer than Father Brant’s old tatty one.

Father Brant started to rise but couldn’t make it all the way up. Asha took his hands and helped. He didn’t release her immediately. Asha held in her revulsion and didn’t look at his skin against hers. Father Brant looked her over with his cataract-filled eyes and _saw_ her with all the perception of a man who’d worn the cloth for an entire lifetime. “You’re troubled, child.”

Asha stalled. How could a blind man see so clearly?

“Is my hair a mess?” Father Brant asked.

Or not. “You’re fine.”

His mouth pulled to the left and she realized he’d made a joke at his own expense. It wasn’t very often he _knew_ he was not the man he used to be and in good enough humour to jest about it. “What’s bothering you?”

Dreams and reality and the spaces between. “It’s nothing.”

“Nothing becomes quite heavy when you carry it forever.”

He used to always say stuff like that, Asha remembered now.

“Is it about Mister Vealer?”

_And_ he remembered Joan. Asha’s expression felt ugly, caught somewhere between a smile and a frown.

“That boy has a demon in him,” Father Brant continued. “Darkness.”

“People are rarely all light or all dark,” Asha quoted Father Brant from his confessional days when she would sit behind the confessionals when she wasn’t supposed to, and listen, just because she was bored. And curious, if she was honest with herself. Piousness had always been the water slipping through her fingers.

“True,” the old man agreed. “Quite true. He needs guidance, though.”

“I’m trying.”

“ _You_ need guidance,” he said in a factual way.

They were the blind leading the blind. Asha rubbed her knee where her Sunday pants were wearing thin. She sighed. “Have you ever been in love, Father?”

“I’m a priest.”

“Of course.” Frustrated, Asha whisked her hair back from her face. It was getting dark, as it usually did in the winter, losing its blonde lustre, and getting long; she needed to cut it soon.

Father Brant clutched her arm as Asha reached for the door. “There was a woman, once. Her hair was red like sunsets and her feet were small. Sometimes, she’d take them out of her shoes when I was giving my sermon. Her toes were always painted. Red, too. A bold colour. The colour of sin.”

Asha curled her nose up, regretting she asked. “Okay.”

“She made me think _things_. Love does that, child. Makes a man mad. Eve may have been born from Adam, smaller and more innocent, but God gave her such power over us, to even the balance, I’ve often thought, though the scales have long been tipped in her direction.”

“What happened to her?” Asha asked on a whim. “The woman you loved?”

“Secrets are buried in the Garden. Under the apple tree,” he said.

Asha didn’t understand. “What do you mean?”

“She was a wicked woman.” His voice had the particular cadence that came just before an outburst. He gripped the sink for support and dug his spider’s fingers into the straight razor Asha had used on his neck earlier. She watched the blood pool out over the porcelain. She’d seen her fair share of horror but Father Brant was delicate, his skin like paper, his heart a soggy muscle that struggled to flex most days. He couldn’t afford to lose so much blood.

“You’ve hurt yourself.” Asha gripped his hand. He resisted at first and she was afraid, however briefly, that he was going to turn violent like senile Mister Botris did two years ago when his wife tried to help him out of a pew. She hurried to use her healing magic, that always calmed him.

The mean glint left his mouth. He relaxed. His fingers stopped bleeding. Asha pried the razor from his hand and dropped it in the sink. Blood streaked in the bowl. She’d have to clean it later. For now, she needed to get Father Brant away from the washroom. Hopefully, movement would put some distance between him and his lost love as well.

He was calm descending the stairs, and quiet, he didn’t speak at all. The main floor was empty; everyone had filed into the church already. Asha followed the sound of their voices, quiet, respectfully whispering to each other.

Her eyes travelled, as always, to Joan, who was passing along the collection bowl. His sleight of hand was excellent but Asha caught sight of his tricky fingers folding _vign_ and sliding it into the sleeve of the collared shirt he took from the donations box a week after he arrived.

He felt eyes on him and looked Asha’s way. His smile softened his betrayal.

* * *

Most of the day had gone by before Asha could find Joan behind the church, sitting on a picnic table stained with the tears of mourners as they came to the dead. He smoked a cigarette he’d probably pilfered from Bjorn and flipped a coin over his fingers. He wasn’t very good at it, dropping it on occasion.

“Practicing for the next time you steal from the donation bowl?” Asha tried to soften her words with a smile but an accusation was an accusation no matter _how_ sweet her face looked.

Joan took his time answering, dragging on his cigarette and blowing it all towards the sky. “Are you mad about that?”

“That money helps people like you and me.”

“And it’s _still_ helping people like you and me.” He reached into his pocket and brought out something small and wrapped in foil, sliding it her way.

Asha came forward warily and took it from him. She knew what it was before opening it. “You shouldn’t have taken the money for this.”

Joan’s trickster’s smile was playing around his mouth again. “I know, it’s supposed to be used on practical things, but when do you ever get to have fun, Asha?”

When she was with him.

“I promise I’ll pay the money back one day. Just eat it.”

It wasn’t like it could go back anyway, the bakery wouldn’t accept it. She sat beside Joan and peeled back the foil carefully, revealing the rich, dark chocolate from her favourite bakery. It was on Gerald Street, and once, when she was very small and walking the street with her hand held in Father Brant’s, on their way to a public sermon, a lady with a large black hat and a blue dress and pearls around her neck had stopped them. Abigale Frost. She was a Councilwoman on the Mage’s Council and a supporter of various low-income services, such as His House of Perpetual Peace.

Councilwoman Frost spoke to Father Brant for a moment about adult things that didn’t interest Asha, then she bent down so she was eye-to-eye with Asha and held out a slab of this chocolate. It was the first time Asha could remember tasting something so sweet and bitter. She loved it. She’d loved it so much, she told Joan about it years later. And he’d remembered. It was a small thing but her heart swelled with joy. Usually, people looked at her but never _saw._ They heard her speak but never _listened._ Not until she could do something for them, anyway.

“Have some.” Asha broke off a chunk and gave it to Joan. They ate in silence. It started to snow and though it was cold, she didn’t _feel_ it.

The back door opened and Bjorn came out. He’d recently shaved his head and his face. Some men looked younger with clean faces. Bjorn looked dangerous. Without a skim of beard to cover it, Asha could see he’d been in a fight, his jaw was blue and black and there was a cut at the corner of his eye.

“Hey, brother.” He dropped onto the bench across from Asha and plucked the cigarette from Joan’s hand. “Did you get the cash?”

Joan didn’t look at Asha. “I got it.”

“Good. And you got the bullets?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you need bullets for?” Asha asked.

“Teaching skids a lesson,” Bjorn said casually.

She again looked at his bruised face. “The person that punched you?”

Bjorn’s mouth twitched into a smile that didn’t meet his eyes.

“Do you even have a gun?” she whispered.

Bjorn chose not to answer. Chilled, Asha squirmed further into her coat and pulled up her hood. It only made her marginally warmer. She had a hole in the armpit she kept meaning to sew and she was missing fluff. A mouse had made a nest in her pocket last spring and had taken a large amount of stuffing out. Asha ate another piece of chocolate, thinking about dangerous men and dangerous things, thinking about being God’s girl.

“What’ve you got there, Ash?” Bjorn asked.

She didn’t _want_ to share but she did because protesting would only make things worse. Bjorn took a big chunk and chewed it carefully and only on his left side. He must have been hurt worse than he let on. _Who would be foolish enough to attack him?_ Asha wondered. _And who got_ away _with it?_ She wouldn’t get an answer even if she asked. _Does Joan know?_ He must. He was off buying bullets for Bjorn. With money he stole from the donation bowl.

She could scream. What was wrong with the world and with all the people in it? What was wrong with _her_ that she couldn’t say anything to stop the spiral of the people she loved?

Bjorn picked up a piece of wood he kept on the picnic bench and began to whittle it inexpertly. He didn’t have a proper carving knife so he used a black and gold filigree one he’d pinched from Constable David Keen, a Sunday regular. Asha thought he took it just to make a statement. The last time Bjorn was arrested for public intoxication, it had been Keen’s cuffs on his wrists. Bjorn could hold a grudge better than an alley cat. He was capricious. Which is why Asha loved his attention, if she was honest with herself. She walked a wire around him. But for the last six weeks, she did it without faltering. Bjorn loved Joan, and Joan… he hadn’t told Asha he loved her, but if it wasn’t love keeping her bed warm as winter slipped in through her window, it was the closest she ever cared to get. It was intoxicating.

Bjorn’s knife slipped and the thing he’d been carving—some mixture between beast and woman he’d been working on for two weeks—broke. Bjorn stared at the detached arm and Asha caught her breath, waiting for the coming eruption. Bjorn’s eyes flashed and his jaw flexed. But then satisfaction settled over him, like he’d strived to make something ugly-beautiful only so he could break it in the end.

He closed his knife and stood. Asha leaned back warily, but Bjorn only took out a cigarette and lit it. He passed one to Joan, too, pretending to be oblivious to the way Asha watched him like he was explosive, though she imagined he loved it.

“I’m bored,” he said as Joan handed back his lighter. “Let’s get out of here.”

“And go where?” Asha dared to ask. It was past midnight; Father Brant usually woke up around two to go to the washroom. He’d need her close by.

“Rurik’s,” Bjorn responded.

Asha bit her lip. Rurik lived by the fountains in the middle of town, at least a thirty-minute walk.

“Stay here if you want,” Bjorn said. “Let’s go, Joan.”

Joan rose without question. Asha watched him for a moment. He’d lost some weight since coming to the church. He also had circles beneath his eyes and a scab on his arm he tried not to pick when Asha was looking at him. He moved too much, especially in the mornings before he saw Bjorn, slept too infrequently.

It all added up to one thing, but she didn’t know how to ask him how often he choked back or crushed pills, afraid of upsetting this delicate balance they had. Afraid that he was more important to her then she was to him. Afraid of overstepping her bounds. Love was complex _and_ unforgiving.

Joan held out his hand for Asha and she took it. He was warmer than she was, his hands calloused and scarred.

Bjorn said nothing as they all fell into step. Joan, too, was silent, though he usually had _something_ to talk about. Asha wracked her brain to fill the silence but she couldn’t think of anything worth saying, everything sounded like trepidation or a complaint. So she watched the street.

This late, only two kinds of people were out. Those that were ignorant of what the Night held, and those in Night’s hand. _And I must be the latter,_ she thought, though _how_ that had happened, she didn’t know. She was the good girl. _God’s girl_. Father Brant’s girl. Joan’s. And Night’s. _Can I be everyone’s?_ And if she was, could she still, too, belong to herself? _Have I ever?_ She was the castaway. Always. No one else had ever wanted her. _Have you balanced your self-worth based on how much others need you_?

The shameful truth was yes. Father Brant had never wanted a child at his feet. His God told him to keep her, though, and Asha was _glad_ when his mind started going soft. It gave her the opportunity to actually be something to him. To belong. He was her unwilling family, just like Bjorn, just like Joan, and she wasn’t going to let them go for anything.

Joan slung his arm around her waist and snugged them up close together. She felt his ribs expanding into hers as he breathed and watched that breath fog in front of his lips. His cheekbones looked more pronounced. Asha was touching him before she could stop herself. Joan’s jaw was tense beneath her fingers like he was daring her to say something. _Hoping?_

She didn’t, and he didn’t, and the tense moment turned into a kiss that softened the edges of anxiety.

“Halt!” barked a voice, startling Asha so bad, she couldn’t even yell. She pulled away from Joan and hunted for whoever had spoken.

Heavy work boots smacked on cobblestone, half a dozen, at least. Bjorn grabbed Asha and Joan and yanked them back into the shadow of a creamery, where they waited to see which direction the danger came from before fleeing.

A skinny boy Asha’s age tumbled out of an alley across the road and scampered into the yellowy glow of a streetlight. He was looking over his shoulder so his toe hung up on the curb and he sprawled on his hands and knees. The knees and elbows tore out of his clothing and blood dotted the roadway. His breaths wheezed loudly. He’d been running for some time, and he was scared. He was white with fear.

Asha made to help him but Bjorn snagged the back of her sweater and dragged her back so quickly, threads in the collar ripped. She opened her mouth to protest. The words got stuck.

Gold blazed as men and women stepped from shadows. Their armour sparkled in the low light, made of real precious metals, Asha bet. The Mage Council’s Crimson Guard dressed far more ostentatious than any other regiment of the King’s Imperial Army.

One man wearing a Captain’s sigil carried a large staff infused with two crystals, Amethyst and Tiger’s Eye. Asha didn’t know their purpose, but they were imbued with so much magic, it made her skin crawl.

The Captain stepped forward. “Surrender for registration, Damen, you owe service to your King and country.”

Damen hiccoughed and started to run again, ignoring the bite in the Captain’s voice. The Captain seemed to expect resistance. He raised his hand up and clenched his fist and his men stepped in. Their blue pauldrons marked them as water users.

Asha held her breath as the air got dense with magic and then a torrent fell from the sky. Damen was hit in the chest with all the force of a raging river and was thrown to the ground. The attack was over in an instant. Water trundled into sewer grates and gutters, leaving Damen gasping wetly in the centre of the road. He did not fight as the Crimson Guard came at him with handcuffs and a metal collar scratched with runes that would bind his magic. Asha knew the King used those on criminals, rogue mages, deserters, terrorists. But citizens?

“Get him up,” the Captain ordered. His men did his bidding, hoisting the boy by the elbows and hauling him away, his toes dragging across the ground.

Then there was silence.

“What was that all about?” Asha whispered when she was certain they were gone.

“No fucking idea. Let’s get out of here, though.” Bjorn checked both ways before stepping out into the street. No one attacked him. Asha followed, slower. Joan was behind her, watching. She felt better with him back there. Safer.

Rurik’s apartment was on the next street over. It was nicer than the rest of Bjorn’s friends’, middle-class-clean, middle-class-bright. The front door had a lock that _worked_ , and a buzzer to call up. Bjorn jammed the number and then leaned his back against the window, smoking and waiting for Rurik to answer. The leather of his coat creaked as he rocked his shoulders back and forth, irritating Asha.

“The King can’t just _take_ people off the street.” Maybe Bjorn and Joan were satisfied ignoring what they just saw, but she was unsettled.

“Mages aren’t people, Asha, the faster you learn that the better off you’ll be,” Bjorn responded.

Asha looked to Joan for help but his face was a mask. She tried to mimic it but couldn’t get it quite right.

 


	4. Chapter 4

After a long wait in strained silence, the door to Rurik’s apartment buzzed and opened. Bjorn took the lead again, bringing them up to the second floor and then down a hallway that smelled like cigarettes, to door number seventeen. It was unlocked.

Unlike the outside of the tidy, middle-class apartment building, the inside looked exactly like Asha expected it _should._ Dozens of shoes kicked off just inside the door, bodies strewn all over furniture like leaves on the ground, limp and slowly ageing but laughing because they were not quite certain of their lot in life.

There were a lot of empties lying around but mostly, the air was thick with Stavia, a relaxant sometimes prescribed by doctors. It was expensive and difficult to grow. She wondered how Rurik got his hands on it.

Laughter and music filled the spaces Stavia smoke did not. Someone had gotten a graphophone. It was the first time Asha had ever seen one _not_ in the window of a music shop. It whistled out a woman’s voice and a saxophone. She wanted to pick it apart, this seemingly magic thing that was made purely by technology, so she could understand what made it work the way she understood how bodies worked. It was best not to get too close, though. She couldn’t fix it if she broke it and she certainly couldn’t pay for it.

Rurik pulled out of the crowd and approached them. Asha had to look way up to see his face, he was so tall. He was going grey around his temples and in his beard, and his mouth had deep cracks around its edges. He had more scars than she could count, above his eyes, over his nose, around his cheeks, from getting cracked in the face one too many times. His knuckles, too, were knobby and tough-looking, like the hide of a beast. His fearsome countenance used to scare her when she was younger before Bjorn came along and introduced them, when she’d just see him on the streets of Ester. If she was honest with herself, he still kind of scared her now, though now she had different reasons to fear him. He had a demeanor as sharp as broken glass and there seemed to be an endless list of things that set him off. Asha tried to stay away from him when she could.

“Hey, brother.” Bjorn had no such reservations and grabbed him around his shoulders and smacked his back roughly.

“No troubles getting here?” Rurik’s accent came from the north and reminded Asha fiercely of wind and snow and miles and miles of ice.

“We saw the EU,” Asha bubbled over like a tea kettle left too long to boil, unable to help herself. “They chased a boy down right there in the streets and almost washed him away. They put a collar on him and took him.”

Rurik’s eyes were flat and difficult to read as he let go of Bjorn and took a step back. “Again?”

“When did it happen before?” asked Asha.

A girl with copper hair and green eyes broke away from the other guests and sidled up beside them, a gossip’s smile on her mouth. “That’s the third one,” she gushed. “They marched through Tent City last week and took that little scruffy girl, you know the one with the one-eyed dolly?”

Asha _did_ know the one. She always carried it around by its dirty brown hair and skipped quartz down the centre of the street, hitting the shoes of pedestrians. Most people ignored her but sometimes, they’d back her into a corner and scream.

It didn’t really _surprise_ Asha to know that girl was magic. She was peculiar.

“Who else?” Asha asked.

“A lady that was always going into Madam Comfi’s shop, buying her fortune.” Madam Comfi did cheap tea and card readings for anyone passing through Wallace Avenue, Ester’s unofficial black market for magics a person couldn’t get at any reputable shop. Illegal crystals, unregulated charms, imported goods from across the Sapphire Sea that didn’t pass regulations.

“Did they say what they were doing?”

“When I asked they told me to mind my own and gave me this.” The girl turned her head, showing Asha a fading brown bruise on her temple. “Then they swiped me over with these crystals.”

“Why?” Asha had forgotten about Rurik and Bjorn and even Joan, entranced with the girl’s story.

She leaned in and dropped her voice conspiratorially. “Madam Comfi told me the crystals were spelled to show them mages.”

Asha had never heard of such magic before. “That’s possible?”

She shrugged. “They have crystals for everything, why not for telling if you’ve got magic in you?”

Why not, indeed? “Then what? What happened to the people?”

She lifted her thin shoulder again. “No one’s come back.”

Asha let that sink in for a moment. The government was taking unregistered mages right off the streets and disappearing them without a trace. And no one was talking about it.

_Because they had no one to mourn them._

“That’s terrible.” Asha wrapped her arms around her middle, thinking of her magic and what the Crimson Guard might do to her to get their hands on it. She didn’t _want_ to be a healer for wars she didn’t start. Maybe she didn’t love her country enough.

Bjorn snorted, reminding Asha he was there. “Poor fucking mages, they get taken in, trained. Three square meals a day, barracks without a leak over their heads, and, what else? Oh, right. Gold fucking armour. Don’t be sad for them, Asha. They’re fucking scum.”

“Yeah,” she said weakly. They were the worst.

“I’m Necia.” The redhead sidled in front of Bjorn like she didn’t notice him there, giving her attention solely to Asha. Bjorn looked miffed. He didn’t often get slighted like that.

“Asha.”

Bjorn set his jaw and turned away from them as if to say he had better things to do. Asha knew he still had things to say but he bottled them all up to give the pretence of indifference.

He turned to Joan and said, “You got the money?”

And Joan took a wrinkled wad of donation money from his coat pocket and handed it to Rurik. Rurik, in turn, passed off a baggy of white pills. They were different from whatever it was he’d taken from the apothecary. Small and pearlescent.

Bjorn’s indifference was more genuine now. “Come on, I’ve got something I wanted to talk to you about,” he said to Rurik.

Asha remembered the bullets Joan had held out for the moonlight to glide over.

When they started away, Joan joined them after only a half-smile and wink in her direction. They disappeared into a room at the back of the apartment. She was alone with Necia now, who chattered so much, she could talk the head off a corpse, as Asha had heard Bjorn say a time or two.

“You want to sit?” Necia took a break to ask, though she was already dragging Asha away, towards the window, and a group of people that sat on cushions and passed around a hookah that billowed grey smoke. “These guys are pretty alright. Don’t let Casper talk too much about fungus, though. He’ll never stop.”

Asha smiled limply at the irony.

The group made room for them and even deigned to share their drugs. Asha passed on it when it came her way; Necia sucked it back like it was water and she’d been in the Bones Desert for ten days, then she went around, giving Asha names that she ejected from her mind almost as soon as they came to it. They asked her questions like they cared what she had to say. She answered them brusquely because she didn’t _care_ about these people. She didn’t care to know them and she didn’t care for them to know her.

She looked back again for Joan. He still wasn’t out. Suddenly, she felt isolated. She didn’t like parties.

Necia had a bottle of rum that she passed to Asha. Asha drank just because, frustrated.

Someone changed the music when it stopped. The clock tower struck two. Father Brant would be getting up soon. The people in the group cackled like a bunch of grackles around a feeder. Asha turned to Necia for distraction. Her sort of new friend was too high to make much conversation beyond hyena laughs. Resigned, Asha rested her cheek on her knees and wrapped her arms around her legs, making herself small.

Weight fell onto the cushion behind her sometime later and a body leaned into her back. She straightened, uncomfortable until she smelled the shampoo Joan used. He used cool, dry hands to pull aside her hair and leaned in. His lips were warm and his breath was hot.

“Hi.”

“Where did you go?”

“Just talking to Bjorn.”

“About what?”

He kissed her neck. “After.”

 _After._ She didn’t _care_ about after. She cared about _now._ About guns and drugs and secrets. “I want to go home.”

“In a bit.” His voice was too slurred. He was high again.

Asha shook him off and stood. “No. I’m going now. Stay if you want.” Petulant, yes. But satisfying.

Joan looked up at her. Necia was also looking. Asha wouldn’t meet her eyes as she got back into her sweater and started for the door. Bjorn watched her from one of the couches. There was a girl Asha didn’t know under his arm. Like Joan, his eyes were glassy. She waited for him to say something, tell her to stay or hell, even to ask her where she was going, but Bjorn had never been in the business of giving people what they wanted.

Tears pricked her eyes; she didn’t even know _why_. It felt safe to let them fall once she’d cleared Rurik’s building and was crossing the street towards the fountains. The water was turned off and the pool was drained and everything was silent. She didn’t like the city like this. It felt poised, like a bandit ready to strike. She thought of the boy Damen and the Crimson Guard chasing him through the streets. He hadn’t stood a chance.

 _And where will he go?_ How would they convince non-registered mages to join the Calatrava? She imagined fleets of collared sprites ready to reach into her mind with their peculiar magic and bend her into whatever they wanted—make her a killer or a saint, as they saw fit. She wouldn’t march with the army; she’d fly into battlefields on a Pegasus like some kind of angel of death. She would wave her hand and men in the tens would fall, no scratches, no bruises, just _dead_.

_It's not what God’s girl would do._

Asha heard feet scrape over the ground behind her. She ducked into shadow before glancing back. Gold armour gleamed in the moonlight, lustrous and proud. The Captain was back out, prowling for his next victim, his staff held in front of him like a dowsing rod. He waved it to the north, and then back to the south. The amethyst shone like a miniature sun when it passed by Asha. Her heart lodged in her throat; she sank further into the shadows, where they leached into an alley that led to Wallace Avenue.

“There’s another nearby.” The Captain’s voice carried through the alley. “It’s a corporis.”

Not only could they track her, they could tell what _kind_ of mage she was? Amethyst for corporis, and Tiger’s Eye for elemental? Asha reasoned. Her thoughts were racing. She had to lose them. _And then what? Will you hide forever?_

“This way,” ordered the Captain. Their voices were getting close.

 _Do I stay in the alley and hope they’ll go down the street instead?_ But if she did that and they _did_ choose to come her way, she’d be a sitting duck. _Keep going_ , she decided. She was safer moving. She pulled up her hood and walked, not too fast, not too slow, trying not to draw attention her way.

Garbage choked the ground and made everything more difficult; there was little light that came through from Wallace Avenue, where most of the streetlamps were broken. Asha tripped over a bag that rattled like it was full of broken glass and cringed.

“Halt!” the Captain called, certain now that there was actually someone ahead of him to chase. Asha did the opposite, stretching her short legs to their maximum length and _running._ She broke out onto Wallace Avenue and though she was exposed, the running was easy. It felt like she could fly, clearing garbage bags and crates and a leg or two.

“ _Halt_ , in the name of the King!”

She almost did—that voice was authoritative, it demanded to be listened to. _She would not._ She pushed past a lady in a soft fur scarf and jostled a man carting around vials. He dropped three and when they exploded on the pavement, great clouds of smoke filled the streets. Men and women gasped, some coughed. The vial holder yelled after Asha. She was gone, though, too far away for him to touch now.

At the end of Wallace Avenue was a tent larger than the rest. Its sides were canvas and it glowed from within, as though filled with a million candles. Asha considered ducking inside to hide from the guard there, but when she got close, her skin crawled and some primal instinct told her to stay away.

She veered around its side instead and thought she heard a waterfall of whispers, there and gone in an instant.

Wallace Avenue terminated in a cul-de-sac and on the other side was wild ground. Meadow grasses, dead branches, fox holes—a million things for her to trip on. She ran without regard to her well-being. Hillocks tried to tear her to the ground and horsetails whipped at her shins.

The air got dense with magic and humid and she knew she was about to receive the same treatment as Damen did. She pumped her arms faster, _moved,_ moved with every ounce of energy she had to spare.

Ahead, the field changed into Jarvie Road. On the other side was Silver River Canal. _Jump in the water._ The thought was borne from desperation. She wouldn’t survive being submerged in Silver River, its waters ran through fields of Silver Dragon flower and Silver Dragon was deadly poisonous to mages. She’d be dead in minutes.

_Better dead than a slave, though, right?_

It didn’t matter what she decided to do _._ All at once, a river rushed from the sky and pushed Asha to the ground, flat on her back. It was everywhere. She choked and gagged. The torrent went on for several long seconds, the sound rushing in her ears like a hurricane.

It petered to a stop. Cool air hit Asha’s wet face. She hiccoughed in a breath and choked out the rest of the water in her lungs. Men surrounded her. One held a metal collar open for her neck. She wouldn’t meet the man’s eyes, looking desperately for an exit.

 _Pop, pop, pop,_ split the night. The Crimson Guard whipped around, magic and weapons at the ready. Some had rifles, others swords. Asha didn’t let herself be afraid by their appearance. She had one chance. She commanded her body to move and it obeyed. She dodged around one of the men and then she was clear to run.

“Hey!” shouted one of the guards. Water lapped at Asha’s feet, trying to tear her down.

_Pop, pop, pop!_

The water disappeared as the Crimson Guard was forced to direct their attention elsewhere. Asha could run and _did_ , getting onto Jarvie and dashing into an alleyway. Rose Boulevard was on the other side.

Someone appeared out of the shadows and raced down the street towards her. Asha started to go the other way to dodge him, but then she recognized the glint of his green hair beneath the streetlamps and slowed. He held a piece of fired metal in his hand—the gun to go with the bullets. Every time he pumped his arms, the moonlight slid down its edge as if highlighting its danger.

Joan grabbed her with his free hand and they were off, slipping into Night’s hand like wraiths, going through back alleys even Asha didn’t know existed.

The shouts of men got distant, and His House of Perpetual Peace rose up from the horizon, looking every bit a saviour. Asha’s legs were jelly and there was a stitch in her side. She stopped in the side yard and leaned against an ancient cherry tree so she could catch her breath, afraid of waking Father Brant up in her current state with all of her huffing and puffing. Her head rushed and she got dizzy. Her mouth watered. She spat repeatedly, praying for the feeling to pass.

Joan gave her a moment, but not any longer. “We need to get inside.”

She was safe in there. Maybe.

Asha took in one more greedy breath of cool night air then pushed away from the tree and staggered up the walkway. Someone had lit candles and left them on the curb leading into the church. The wind had snuffed most of them out. Joan tried the door. It opened noisily. Inside was absolutely black. He snagged a candle and used it to see by. Asha followed its flickering trail up the stairs as quietly as she could. Her chest was still heaving.

Father Brant’s door was still closed. That was a small reprieve. Asha ducked into her room after Joan and closed the door. Then she lit her oil lamp and turned the flame down low. Joan grabbed a towel off her chair and handed it to her. She stripped down right there, shivering and cold, and dried.

“Did they hurt you?” Joan asked.

Asha looked herself over. Scrapes, bruises, but nothing major. “I’m okay.” Scared, though. “What if they followed us here?”

“I won’t let them take you,” Joan said fiercely. His knuckles were white on the gun.

“They’re the Crimson Guard,” Asha hissed. “They take whoever the hell they want.” A gun wasn’t going to stop them.

His shoulders knotted. “I didn’t let them take you tonight, did I?”

 _Luck_ , the rational part of her mind whispered. _It was all luck that Joan had a gun._ Though that felt like ill tidings. _Luck that we were able to outrun them in a part of the city Joan_ knows _._

“ _Did_ I?” Joan pressed.

“No,” Asha admitted. “But Joan, if they’re trolling the slums looking for—” she wouldn’t say _mages._ She never did in the church, it was just a rule, in case Bjorn was listening, “—people like me, they’re going to find me.”

Joan looked her over. Asha clutched her nightgown to her body, shivering too badly to put it on. “I’ll find a way to fix it,” he said, at last, coming to her and putting his arms around her. He was warm but still smelled like winter. “There has to be a way.”

She wanted badly to believe him.


	5. Chapter 5

While Father Brant ate a breakfast of oatmeal in their modest kitchen the next morning, Asha checked the local paper for any indication that the Crimson Guard has been spotted stealing mages from dark and forgotten parts of Ester, reading front to back. There was mention of an altercation outside the Black Cat, Ester’s strip bar, and a woman had been stabbed near the Stacks, the unofficial district for sex and drug trade, but that was all she could glean.

“Read me the opinion pages,” Father Brant ordered. For a godly man interested in an enlightened way of thinking and living, he was certainly a gossip hound. Asha obliged, reading the disapproving passages about the government’s partnership with the Mage’s Council and the equally crotchety recounting of the government’s expenditures on city beautification projects. According to one citizen, tourists weren’t important to Ester’s economy, though Asha knew people travelled from far and wide to see the King’s vacation home, what he’d affectionately named the Dwarf Palace, and its massive botanical gardens.

Joan was getting up as Father Brant was laying down for a nap, near three. He’d spent the night in Asha’s room, restlessly touching her, he, tired but unable to sleep because of those pills he’d taken, and she, exhausted but wired, thinking about guards and guns and the mouth that left bruises on her belly and her thighs.

“Do you know where Bjorn is?” Asha whispered down the hall, closing Father Brant’s door.

Joan shook his head. “Last I saw he was at Rurik’s.” 

Bjorn came and went like a stray dog. When he needed a home, he’d have one. That was the way it’d always been and she suspected that’s the way it would remain. But she couldn’t help but worry, remembering his blackened eye and the bullets and the gun.

She waved Joan down the hall and into the kitchen, where she put on the kettle. Joan sat down at the table, pushing his dyed green hair back from his forehead. The colour was fading, looking pale now, like the colour of lamb’s ear. He was blonde, like her. Her fingers itched to travel through his hair and kiss him more. There were plenty other places on her body he could leave love bites.

She willed herself to focus.

“Who was he getting the gun for?” The boiling water made her question seem less abrupt, almost, like it wasn’t the only noise filling the air, so it wasn’t drawing all of the attention.

Joan stared at her.

“I know it was for _someone_ , so don’t try to lie.” She wasn’t even particularly surprised he’d gone out of his way to get a gun, Bjorn always danced the line of violence—it was his favourite place to be in the world. She was, however, worried that he might actually _use_ it on someone.

“I can’t really talk about it, Asha.”

“You _won’t,_ you mean.” It was important he understood the difference.

He went back to staring at her and she stared back, thinking _I’m not going to crack and break this stalemate,_ but cracking anyway. “It’s not fair you get all of my secrets but I get nothing in return.”

“It’s not my secret to give.”

“It affects people I love, so you should tell me.”

Joan looked away from her once, twice, and she knew she had him. “He’s been using the same dealer forever and she’s been skimming him for twice as long.”

“It’s just over drugs?” Asha said after a moment. Joan shrugged and tapped his eye. “It was his dealer that punched him,” she realized. “But why?”

“I think you should mind your own fucking business, Asha.” 

Bjorn’s voice startled Asha so badly, she almost screamed. She looked back over her shoulder and found him standing in the doorway looking like a thunderstorm about to land. His eye was more swollen today than it’d been yesterday, black and purple and red and green, like an ugly flower.

_Say something,_ she encouraged herself. _Anything._ Anything that would take him from this path. She was sure it was going to bring them suffering. “I’m worried about you.”

He softened minutely for an instant, and then he was back to being his broody, moody self. “I don’t need a nanny.”

But he needed a family and this church was all people like them had. She couldn’t figure out a way to relay that, though, without making herself vulnerable to Bjorn’s rejection. She sat quietly and let him address Joan.

“Meet me at the picnic table at eleven.” 

Asha bunched her hands into her tunic. Only misadventures came out of moonlight meets.

Bjorn turned on his heel and disappeared. Asha dropped her chin into her waiting palms and shook her head. Joan let her mope in silence for a little while. Then he stood. She thought he was leaving her but he came around behind her and wrapped his arms around her shoulders, his lips against her neck. “You care too much about people that don’t deserve it.”

She turned her head as much as she could to look into his dark eyes. “Don’t say stuff like that.”

Joan acted like she hadn’t spoken. “Stay in tonight.”

“While you and Bjorn do _what_ exactly?” Shoot the gun not at the sky, as Joan had last night, but at an actual person, living and breathing and falsely unafraid of Bjorn’s taciturn moods? Because if she knew the real Bjorn Gunnar, she never would have hit him like that.

“Don’t worry about us,” Joan was looking at the front page of the paper as he said it, obviously thinking about what happened last night.

“There’s no story in there about the Guard or what they’ve been doing to people,” she said, dispelling the mystery for him.

“It’s not right,” Joan murmured. 

“No one cares about people like me.” 

Asha waited for Joan to deny her, reassure her that society wasn’t an unfeeling monster, but he couldn’t do that because it was _true_. It was almost like groups of people lost their ability to sympathize.

“But if you’re here, you’re safe.” Joan kissed her neck to soften his words.

It was nice, in a way, to be cared for enough to be told to stay indoors. It was also annoying. She suspected he had an ulterior motive. If she wasn’t out there with them, she couldn’t stop Bjorn from trying to do something that would get him into a lot of trouble if he was caught.

_And something bad, like_ hurt _someone,_ she reminded herself, sheepish it wasn’t her first thought and thankful that Joan couldn’t read minds and discover she wasn’t always the girl she pretended to be. The good girl. God’s girl. 

“I’m not sure if church walls are going to keep them out if they want to find me.”

“Better than open streets will. And we’ll never be able to explain to Bjorn if they catch up to us while he’s there.”

True enough.

“Please, Asha.” Joan’s mouth wandered down her neck. Chills ran races down her spine every time he kissed her and his arms tightened around her shoulders. 

Asha heard Father Brant’s door open and pushed Joan back, thankful for the distraction, that way she wouldn’t have to lie.

  

Joan left Asha’s room at ten to eleven. Asha dressed all in black first, then perched in her alcove window, looking down on the graveyard and the picnic table, watching him cross the grass and settle down on the distressed wood. He lit a cigarette. The smoke glowed in the bright moonlight, white like ghosts. Asha imagined she could see faces and shapes in the globs, dancers revived for moonlight trysts. 

Bjorn walked through them, destroying the illusion with his dour countenance. 

He and Joan spoke for a moment, then Joan took that cursed gun from wherever the hell he’d had it, and slid it over the table. Bjorn took a quick look around before putting it in his coat pocket. He said something else to Joan and then they both left out the back of the graveyard. 

Asha waited thirty seconds before she got up and gave chase.

She was used to being alone in Ester in the moonlight and found as she navigated through the graveyard, following the same path Bjorn had, that she even missed it. It had been a long time since she’d visited Rose Boulevard and watched the families there, wishing she could be one of them. 

Cats prowled through alleyways and she prowled beside them, trying to trace Joan’s steps. She had an idea of where to go—there were only so many places in the city that were safe for people like Bjorn to do the things that made him most happy.

There was a sick hush that blanketed Wallace Avenue as Asha approached it from an alleyway. She hesitated before stepping out into the street, remembering the night before where she’d run for her life. It might be prudent to look before she leapt. She pushed her back against the cold brick of an abandoned factory and peered out into the street.

Fog coated the ground and mostly camouflaged tents and bodies, though when the wind blew and pushed the blanket aside, she saw the odd foot poking out into the little-used street or the cherry of a cigarette as someone smoked. 

Someone had bothered to light the gas lamps; never a good sign. She _thought_ she saw it gliding off something gold nearby, though she couldn’t be sure.

Asha waited for so long in the posed quiet without incident, she was sure she could have run across the street. She was just gearing up the courage to do so when a tent flap not one hundred metres away was pushed aside and a small contingent of armed and armoured men came into the street. The last one out was the Captain of the Guard, his armour brighter than the rest.

His eyes slid right past her and though she wanted badly to pull back into the alleyway, she imagined herself as a grouse on the forest floor and did not move, afraid she’d draw his attention.

He lifted his staff. Asha felt coldness spider-walk from her head to her feet, positive that Joan was right, it was foolish to come out here again, she would be running for her life and this time, she didn’t think there would be a gun to distract them.

The amethyst at the top of his staff remained dark. He swung on his heel with the air of the frustrated and marched with purpose to Madam Comfi’s shop. A moment later, a squealing young man was yanked out by brutes in golden armour. They held him for the Captain of the Guard who seemed to pummel him with questions. The boy shook his head and stuttered his answers, eyes as wide as an owl’s.

The Captain looked him over one more time, then his lip curled and he shooed him away. His guards let go and the boy scampered away, shoving off the sides of buildings and disappearing into the night.

Asha moved back into the shadows and crunched a paper bag loudly. The Captain again looked her way; she tensed to run. A body pressed in beside her and fingers curled into hers. _Too late,_ Asha thought, _They’ve found me._ They must have snuck up on her while she was watching the boy being questioned. _Stupid, stupid_ , she scolded herself, but what was done was done, all there was to do now was pray they would not take her to battle and instead killed her in the street. It seemed more merciful.

“They’re moving the opposite way, you’re safe.”

That was _not_ the authoritative voice of a guard. She strained her eyes against the darkness and recognized Necia’s rust-coloured hair. Her wide mouth was pressed into a straight line. “That’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it? Getting captured?”

“Why would you say that?” Asha’s voice was barely a whisper.

“Because they’re looking for a blonde girl that kind of matches your description and you’re back here, acting like you should be running.”

“I just don’t like them,” Asha managed weakly, thinking she should try a little bit of self-preservation.

Necia shrugged as if she didn’t care either way. “Whatever. If it was you, I’d take advantage of my good fortune and get out of here.”

Asha peered around the edge of the building again. The men were moving further away, towards the large tent that seemed to glow from the inside. It wasn’t likely she’d get a better opportunity. She lifted her hood and stepped onto Wallace, using the fog to mask her movements. Necia fell into step beside her, shoulders straight and head back, fearless.

Asha couldn’t mimic her. Her heart was a bird fluttering in a cage. She listened for the Captain’s baritone voice to tell her to halt and waited to feel the flush of water choke her into submission but miraculously, all eyes were pointed toward the end of Wallace Avenue, at the tent the guards approached, and no one tried to stop her.

The alley on the other side of the road welcomed them into its shadowy folds. It took them to the next street over, where Asha could still hear the Crimson Guard conducting their interrogation, their armour rattling and their sword scabbards scraping across gold, voices rising and falling as they pressed people for information, but she felt almost safe.

Someone huddled in the alcove of a tavern, a gaslight sputtering over their head. When the flame was strong, Asha could see lank hair, liver spots and a wart on a pointy chin, like a witch out of an All Hollow’s Eve tale, but when they spoke, she was reminded of the caravans that would bring goods to sell in Ester from the docks in Grimly. “Who’s that under that hood? Com’ere, girl, let Teddy get a look at ye.” Salty accent, thick as molasses and difficult to understand. They looked at Asha hard as if they could penetrate darkness.

Necia squeezed Asha’s hand, a silent warning to be quiet. “Mind your own business, Teddy.”

“Necia?”

Necia lifted her chin and got a little closer to Asha. “Who else? Don’t bother my friend.”

“Can’t a man see if she’s comely?”

Necia all but snarled, “She doesn’t like men.”

The scandal. Father Brant’s eyes would be rolling in his head.

The man stood. His back was crooked from years of hard labour, but he was solid. And large. “Can’t she speak for ‘er self? Take off the hood, girl, and stand straight.”

Necia didn’t seem to be afraid of him. She let go of Asha’s hand and pushed him hard in the chest. “I told you to leave her alone.” 

The man stumbled back but not away. “The guards says they’re lookin’ for someone. Little girl about yea big.” He nodded in Asha’s direction. “They’re offerin’ a reward, Necia. Whatever we can dream up.”

Asha started to sweat. Money and drugs were Ester’s main currency and the guards couldn’t have found a more cutthroat place to offer it. She didn’t have anything to counteroffer this man. She opened her mouth anyway to beg for his silence. Necia piped up before she could.

“If you see her, you let me know, we’ll go fifty-fifty.”

“Fifty-fifty?” Teddy squawked. “The way I see it, it should be eighty-twenty. I’m the one with the connections.”

“You don’t need connections in the Crimson to hand in a fugitive,” Necia scolded. 

“What would you know?” Teddy retorted, suddenly angry. “You’re just a kid.”

“And you know better because you’re not? Or,” she snorted, “is it because you’re a man?” 

“Both.”

Necia leaned in towards him, suddenly flinty. “The way _I_ see it, no self-respecting girl’s going to go near you, and if you force her, the first thing she’s going to do is call the Watch. The Watch isn’t in the Crimson’s pockets, are they? So they’re going to arrest you and they’re going to let her go and by the time the Crimsons catch wind of it, she’ll be long gone. So if you _do_ spot her, leave the luring to the prettier and take your twenty percent.”

Teddy started forward, a rotten look in his hollow eyes. All of the gaslights chose that moment to extinguish and Teddy dropped to the ground with a weak gasp. Something warm hit Asha’s shoe and cooled rapidly in the plummeting temperature. 

The air sucked her and Necia backwards out of the alley, like a great beast drawing in breath, and spat them out on the next street over. She watched the alleyway leading to Wallace Avenue twist and turn as though she were looking at it through a kaleidoscope.

“What—” she started, but by the time that word was out, the alleyway was back to normal. If she wasn’t one street over, she would think she imagined the whole thing.

“Let’s get out of here,” Necia said sharply and dragged Asha away.

“What was that?” Asha dodged a carriage carting a drunk man through the streets.

Necia looked back. “Probably the Guard doing a spell or something.”

If it weren’t for Teddy’s blood on Asha’s shoes, seen drying when she stepped into the light, she might have believed her. She was too scared to start posturing other theories, though. She didn’t even know where to begin.

Lexie Street was the next one over. The factory Asha scooped Joan out of loomed like a saint on death’s door, saggy and tired but welcoming. They slid into the opening in the wall and came out the other side inside the dilapidated building. It was holy and falling apart but it was comforting all the same. Asha took a deep breath of the urine-saturated air and felt her shoulder muscles unknot. There was no warm meal on the table or mother to tuck her into bed at night, but this safe haven almost like coming home, rats and all. 

Necia pulled her deeper into the factory to a place where she hadn’t been. A toolbox had been knocked over. Once, it was cherry red but now it was rusted and scorched like someone had tried—ineffectually—to set fire to it.

Necia sat on the sagging metal and pulled her down, too. She lit a cigarette and drew on it twice, her only nervous tell, before asking, “Why are they looking for you?”

“They’re not—”

“If they weren’t, you wouldn’t be so afraid.”

“If someone like the Crimson Guard was looking for a girl matching your description, you’d be afraid, too.”

Necia chewed on her cheek. “Point. I still don’t buy it, though. Are you a mage?”

“If I was, don’t you think I’d be registered already?” Being magic was life-altering, just ask any starving child that was born with the gift. Their parents had them assessed by the palace mages and were whisked out of poverty. _Maybe that would have been you if you weren’t abandoned. If Father Brant hadn’t taken you in and proven that your talents were more useful on the poor than the rich._ There was no such thing as free healthcare in Namaul. 

_Saint Asha, letting boys steal and shoot guns and do drugs, as long as they love you. Saint Asha, running from your king and country._

“Another very good point,” Necia muttered, examining her closely as though she could _see_ the magic in her. “Whatever. Even if you’re not the girl they’re looking for, they’re going to spot you soon enough. We should change how you look.”

“How?”

Necia stood and went even deeper into the factory. Asha bit her lip, afraid that Necia would disappear, or worse, return with a Crimson Guard at her side, someone she’d stowed away in here to wait for their return.

Necia reformed out of the shadow. She held a stout bottle, not the hand of a guard, and flashed Asha a smile. “This used to be a tanning factory, you know?”

“No.”

“My dad told me. He used to work here back in the day. When they went bankrupt, they left nearly everything here.” She shook the bottle. “We’ll start with your hair.”

Asha squished her lip between her teeth, excited and scared, and relieved, really, to have another ally, though she was an unwitting one. “What colour is it?”

“Pink, of course.”

Pink hair. “Isn’t the idea _not_ to stand out?”

“No one’s going to be looking for the girl that’s shouting, _I’m here, see me!_ ’ Are they?”

She made a certain sort of sense. Asha sat back for Necia’s ministrations. 

 

 


	6. Chapter 6

 

Parts of Asha’s skin were as pink as her hair; she was sure of it, despite not having a mirror. Down her temples and her neck and across her chest, too. She didn’t know how she was going to get the colour out. Or how long it would last for. That wasn’t even her most distressing issue, though. Her scalp was _burning,_ and when she ran her fingers over her head, she felt welts. Who knew how old that dye was or if it was safe to use on her skin? She wished she could use her healing magic on herself but that wasn’t how it worked, or if it was, she hadn’t learned how to do it.

She leaned further into a small open pond that bordered the middle-class houses in the centre of town and felt relief every time Necia gathered up a handful of icy water and sloshed it over her head. She shivered but she didn’t want to stop.

Boots scuffed over pavement, sending a shock of fear through her heart. She lifted her head and positioned herself over the snowy ground so whoever approached couldn’t hear her dripping into the water.

Two figures emerged from an alley and Asha’s heart leapt for a new reason. Bjorn and Joan. She figured they’d come through this part of Ester when she set out that evening but it was still jarring to find them. She was afraid of what terrible things they’d gotten into and what terrible things were yet to come.

Bjorn walked with the swagger of a man that was ready to throw off his chains and do something terrible, and Joan’s spoke of a man that was already free. She warred with herself, step out and confront them or stay behind and see where they were going.

Necia read the situation with more finesse than Asha gave her credit for, not standing or shouting at them, but being discrete and as quiet as a mouse, just like Asha. “Are we following them?” she whispered when the two men stepped into yet another alley on the other side of the road.

Asha wavered back and forth, trying to decide if Bjorn’s privacy and his wrath were worth the trauma of discovering their misdeeds.

Necia didn’t let her vacillate long. She popped up and yanked Asha up, too. “Before they get too far.”

Someone else’s momentum to infiltrate Bjorn’s business was exactly what she needed. Asha pushed her sopping wet hair back, hearing it land with a thud on her coat, the ends already freezing and fell into a light jog beside Necia.

There was a fresh layer of snow on the ground, making it easier to follow the boys’ progress through the streets, out of the middle-class ring and into the poor, past broken down shops and sagging homes, into a part where even Asha was reticent to go. Here, the people were rich enough to have homes but poor enough to defend them with deadly force if they thought they needed to. Every few months, a body would end up either in the ditch or Silver River, depending on how motivated its killer was feeling. And those were just the people the media knew of. Sometimes, there would be Missing posters posted on the hydro poles. They would be taken down after a few weeks, their loved ones cutting their losses.

_Is it the military taking them, too, or someone else?_

She felt eyes on her and tried to make herself small and unthreatening as she clutched whatever valuables she had tight to her body, afraid they’d be stolen.

The street narrowed into an alley that was choked in vines in the grips of their winter sleep, unusual for this section of Ester to be so ornately decorated. A bad feeling took root in Asha’s belly. Bjorn had gotten himself involved in something she wasn’t at all comfortable with. Which was usual for Bjorn. He attracted trouble the way horses attracted flies. She didn’t understand why he couldn’t just leave well enough alone.

Then she took stock of herself chasing him into Ester’s slummiest slum. The walls of her glass house were thin indeed.

“She’s not here, Bjorn,” Asha heard Joan say. “We should go back.”

“She’s here,” came Bjorn’s reply. “She’s just ignoring us. Trust me.”

Asha grabbed Necia’s arm and crept slowly up the narrow alley, walking heel-toe in slow increments to smother the noise. There was nowhere to hide in here if Bjorn decided to come storming out. They’d be caught and he’d be furious they’d followed him.

Halfway up the alley, Necia nudged a plastic bag that was covered in a layer of snow and it crunched. They both tensed. Bjorn even stopped his continuous knocking to listen. Joan let him get a second in and that was all. “Got a light?”

Bjorn snorted the air out of his nose and the moment was over. He must have passed Joan a lighter because Asha heard him rummaging through his pockets, and then he went back to knocking and Asha went back to creeping forward.

They tucked into a downspout at the end of the alley. Asha very carefully peeked out around the brick wall and spied Joan with his arms crossed over his chest, his head way back so his face was to the moon. Bjorn stood near him, that cursed gun gripped so tight in his hand that she could see his tendons poking out on his wrist. He glared at a thin wood and glass door recessed into the stone and wood wall as if he could scare it into opening up and inviting him inside.

Her heart trotted loudly enough that she could barely hear Joan tell him, “If she is what you say she is, she’s not going to come out and stand here so you can shoot her.”

Bjorn took a deep, deep breath and rammed the door with his fist. Long, tense moments passed and then he assaulted the door again. Asha could see the sweat pricking his brow and the rigidness to his shoulders. He was tense through and through. She was afraid of what would happen if the door pulled back. She didn’t think she’d ever seen him quite like this before—as though he _could_ do the terrible thing he was planning on.

“No one’s here,” Joan sounded bored but Asha could see he, too, was tense. His fingers kept tapping against his arm, drumming out some of his nervous energy.

“Bullshit.” Then Bjorn did something that even surprised Asha. Using the butt end of the gun, he thrashed the window on the door. Glass shattered and sprinkled the snow where it sunk out of sight.

Joan jumped and looked around, the illusion of cool sloughing off him. “What the fuck?”

Bjorn shook out his hand; he was bleeding, the drops falling along with the glass. “I’m tired of her games.”

“And I’m tired of you breaking into my house,” said a cool voice from the other side of the alley. “This will be the third door you make me buy.” Asha stepped back and held her breath as a woman came out of the darkness. She certainly _looked_ like a sprite, tall and lithe, hair as dark as satin skies and eyes as blue as cobalt. Her ears looked human, though, not even pointed in the slightest. She was beautiful and surprisingly well-dressed, considering her choice in abodes. Which could have something more to do with staying off the radar than being unable to afford anything grander. No one would bother her out here in the Stacks. Unless they were foolish men named Bjorn Gunnar.

The woman’s mouth curved downward. “I was generous the first two times this happened but I don’t know if we can kiss and make up this time.” She had a voice like flute music, light and airy and a little bit eerie. “You’re bringing unwanted attention to my home and I’ve sent the wrong message. Now people think it’s okay to violate me here. Imagine.” She looked dangerous stepping forward, a cobra ready to strike.

Bjorn scraped his free hand over his head, a move he generally used to compose his thoughts. This woman shook him to his core—quite literally. He was trembling. “What did you do to me last time?” Bjorn demanded.

She smiled. “Nothing you didn’t want done.”

“You bewitched me.”

“I entertained your desires, which is hardly the same thing. I should ask you what _you_ did to _me._ ” She showed her wrists. Each was encircled by two deep bruises. “I think I liked it, though.” Her teeth flashed in a feral smile.

Bjorn’s neck went red. “You make me do these things. _Witch_.” He started to raise his gun hand. Asha’s heart didn’t just trot, it galloped. She didn’t want to see this and yet, she couldn’t look away, like a fight. Did everyone have this feral need to see blood once things started to get dangerous?

The woman seemed unconcerned as the barrel of the gun focused on her forehead and even stepped forward, into it, so it marked her delicate skin.

“Are you crazy?” Joan asked.

The woman ignored him, all of her attention fiercely on Bjorn. “If I could do the things you say I can, I would make you take that gun and put it against your head.”

“Stop talking.”

“I thought you might want me to start begging?”

Bjorn flexed his jaw. “It won’t do you any good, not this time.”

The woman sighed hugely. “Then I guess this is the end for us. Turn the gun around, Bjorn.” There was something in her voice that made Asha’s stomach turn. A definitive command. Silky ropes of powerful magic draping themselves over Bjorn like funeral robes. “And put it to your head.”

Bjorn looked at the gun in his hand as if he didn’t recognize it for what it was. Asha chewed her cheek, willing him to let the gun go, to get out of there.

“Bjorn,” Joan said, tasting the same danger on the air.

“Be quiet and don’t interfere,” the woman snapped and it was like Joan’s jaw fused closed and his feet cemented in place. She returned her attention to Bjorn and made her voice like sweet water. “Come on, bunny. Turn it around and put it against your temple.”

Bjorn’s hands shook as he did what she ordered and rested the gun beside his eye.

The woman breathed out, satisfied and resigned at the same time. “I am a little sorry. I should have known your prejudices were stronger than your desires but I thought…” She trailed off. “Well, I’ve always loved a hopeless case. Dogs that bite, feral cats, messy men on the verge of destroying themselves. Disasters. You’d think I’d learn but I love it.”

She was close to Bjorn now. She had to reach up to touch his cheek, shorter than him but taller than Asha. She pulled him close and he came to her, as pliant as Asha had ever seen him. She kissed him once on the mouth, chaste. “We had fun, bunny. Didn’t we?”

Bjorn said, “Yes,” so quietly, Asha almost didn’t hear him, though they were close to each other.

The woman smiled sadly. Then she commanded, “Pull the trigger.”

Asha saw Bjorn’s finger flexing. He was going to do it. He was going to pull the trigger and he was going to splatter his brains all over Joan and then the woman was going to turn her focus on Joan and everything Asha loved was going to be taken away from her, right in front of her eyes. _And you’ll be alone._ Just like that.

Something icy cold pooled up inside Asha and spilled over and then Asha felt like she and the woman were connected in a way. Asha could feel her heart, the muscle that kept her alive and well. She imagined squeezing it with both hands. The air charged and the wind stopped. The woman began to choke. She grabbed at her chest, lips split and her dinner running between them.

It was gruesome and intimate and Asha, pious God’s Girl Asha, thought she should hate every moment of it but all she could think was, _good._ Because Bjorn stopped trying to kill himself and stared at the woman and Joan, too, was able to move of his own volition, taking a step away. There was real horror on his face. The worst part was, he didn’t look at the woman whose heart was pulverizing in her chest. His eyes sought Asha out in the dark of the alley like he knew he would find her there, like he knew even before she did that she was capable of this.

She let go of the magic but it was much too late, the woman had already breathed her last. She fell forward into the snow and lay completely still. Asha gripped Necia’s arm so hard, Asha was positive she would have nail marks right through her coat.

Bjorn took a cautious step forward and pushed the woman’s arm with his toe. “Deirdre?”

She even _sounded_ like a sprite. Fleetingly, Asha thought Bjorn was a fool for not seeing it earlier. _Or maybe he didn’t really care._ If she had him under a spell that he _wanted_ to be under, it was possible he didn’t want to see the forest for the trees. And now she was dead and Asha had killed her. She couldn’t help but think this wasn’t the only time, either. The guard that shot Joan had _also_ fallen in much the same way.

She searched her memory, trying to remember if she felt this way then, like she’d run ten miles and her lungs were bottomless and all of her muscles were quivering with the most perfect exhaustion. She felt good and she felt horrible at the same time.

Joan broke her concentration, waving her off behind Bjorn’s back. His message was clear: get out of there before Bjorn noticed her and tonight’s terribleness continued. She took a tentative step back. Her feet crunched snow but Bjorn didn’t seem to notice, he was nudging Deirdre again.

“Get up.” Bjorn’s voice shook. “Deirdre, get _up._ ” Asha had never seen him more clearly. He really was a fool, furious at her for lying to him, for being exactly as she was born to be, but devastated when she was taken from him.

Bjorn flipped her over and held his fingers to her neck. Asha thought she saw moisture on his cheeks. She didn’t want to see him like that. Not ever. She took another step back. Necia followed her, much lighter on her feet, as though a scene like this didn’t make her shoulders sag with its weight.

When they were out on the street, Asha started to run. Necia kept pace with her all the way out of the Stacks and onto Wallace Avenue, where no one seemed to move.

Asha looked for the Crimson Guard before stepping into the street. She was spooked but not enough to cast aside her self-preservation. She could see none of their gleaming armour. She knew she should wait to see if it was a trap but she was trembling so badly, she just wanted to get out of there. She wanted her bed, the safety in the church’s attic. She wanted Joan to come back and tell her she wasn’t a monster. To tell her she was still Pious Asha.

“This is me here.” Necia stopped by a road that led into a different section of the slums where the buildings were tall and crooked, leaning together like husked out cattails in the winter.

Asha wanted to ask her what she thought she saw tonight but she wasn’t brave enough and Necia didn’t seem keen on talking about it. Besides, what _would_ she say? They saw a half-sprite have a massive heart attack. No one could prove the _cause_ of that heart attack.

_You’re safe._

She felt like all of her secrets were on display, though.

“I’ll see you later, Asha,” Necia said. She was already a quarter of the way down the road and getting swallowed by shadows.

Asha opened her mouth to ask her not to say anything but the words were firmly stuck beneath a clog in her throat. After a moment, she was alone and desperately wished otherwise. She put His House of Perpetual Peace in her sights.

* * *

 

Joan didn’t return to her until near dawn. His fingernails were full of dirt and blood, his fingers scraped and his hands bruised. Problem-solving. Digging holes and burying bodies. She wanted to know _where_ and how hard it was to get through the frozen ground and if anyone spotted them. She wanted to know what Bjorn thought. She wanted to know what _Joan_ thought but still, all of her words were stoppered.

Joan saw the look on her face and put his filthy hands against her cheeks. He smelled like frozen graveyard dirt. But he also smelled like Joan. He kissed her lips. “Don’t worry. We handled everything.”

“Bjorn—” Asha finally managed.

“Doesn’t know you were there. Keep quiet and no one but me has to know.”

That wasn’t true. “I was with someone.”

Joan’s eyes got flinty. “Who?”

Asha immediately regretted speaking. She couldn’t take it back now, though. “Necia.”

Joan squinted as he remembered, “The girl from Rurik’s party?”

Asha could only nod.

He got cold and still. “I’ll take care of it.”

The same way he took care of bodies, his tone said. Asha shook her head hard. “No.”

Joan leaned in and hissed, “I don’t like it either but if she talks—”

“She won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

It didn’t matter if she did or not, she didn’t want Joan doing any more terrible things. “She has no idea what actually happened.” Not that she had a better idea herself. She’d just wanted to protect her family and her magic had given her a way to do it. “We’re safe. _Please_ , Joan,” she added when he still looked unconvinced.

He huffed and sat down heavily beside her. They were silent for some time, Asha watching the moon sink with her eyes but in her mind, seeing Deirdre fall and breathe her last, and Joan watching her. He touched the ends of her hair with his filthy hands. “It’s pink.”

“Necia did it for me. To help disguise me.” She flaunted the last so he would see Necia, her first friend, maybe, if she wasn’t scared off completely, wasn’t a threat.

Joan put his hands back in his lap and stared at them, the bleeding nails and the dirt and grime and all the awful things they’d done and all the awful things they’d do still because that was the kind of boy he was. It was terrible to think she wouldn’t love him as much if he wasn’t this way but rejecting terrible things didn’t make them less true.

At last, Joan said, “I think I found something to protect you. _Really_ protect you, better than pink hair.”

The first tendrils of hope helped brush aside the ugliness she’d been feeling. “What is it?”

Joan glanced outside to judge the time. “It’s not a what, it’s a _who_ , and if we’re going to go see him, we need to leave now. He doesn’t do business once the sun comes up.”

“Where do we have to go?”

Joan dropped his voice to barely a whisper, though they’d been speaking quietly already. “Wallace Avenue.”

It always came back to Wallace Avenue. “There was something in there tonight,” she said, remembering how everything went dark, how Teddy’s blood soaked her shoes, and something forced her and Necia from the alleys. “I don’t think I want to go back.” Ever. Just running across the street to come home took as much bravery as Asha thought she had.

“Please, Asha,” Joan said, turning her words around on her. “For me?”

She wrung her shirt in her hands. “Maybe I don’t have to. If I just stay out of the Crimson’s way and only go out in the daylight…” They wouldn’t be so brazen as to take people _then_ , right?

“And never stand beneath the moon, never watch Silver River glow in the darkness, never be able to go back to Rose Boulevard and watch the families?”

Each of his words twanged a chord of longing in her. Except… “You know about that?”

“I used to see you there a lot, on the rain barrel,” he admitted. “I used to think about you sitting out there. I wanted to sit with you.”

“You should have,” she said, thinking then about the _what if’s_. Would things be different now? Would he have been a softer boy, or would he still be in the grips of those pills? Would the security guard be alive? What other things might be different if he’d just come out and said hi?

_Maybe nothing_.

But maybe everything.

Joan stood and offered her his hand. “I don’t want this to be another thing I should have done. Let me take you to Wallace Avenue. Let me protect you.”

She deflated and let Joan help her stand.


	7. Chapter 7

It’d gotten colder since Asha had chased Bjorn and Joan through the streets hours ago. The air felt harsh rattling in her lungs and her skin burned. She huddled in her thin coat and thought about ways she could get a better one. Going to work at a consulting firm as a healer seemed the most obvious but she was doubly afraid now. Would she ever make it out on her first job, or would she go to register as a Calatrava, as _all_ mages that wanted to work for a consulting firm had to do, and be pulled into some dark, forgotten corner of the council building and never return to her old life?

Her life was hard as it was, she decided, but it was her life. She was free to do what she wanted with it. If she went to the Mage’s Council, they’d probably give her to the military, and she’d be no better than a slave. She’d stay poor and free, thank you very much.

The wind gusted and a paper bag not yet soggy from melting snow whisked by, crinkling.

“How did you know I was waiting by Dierdre’s apartment?” Asha asked suddenly.

Joan squeezed her hand. “I felt you. I always do.”

He said it like a premonition, leaving Asha hungry for more of an explanation. “What did it feel like?”

“Like…” he paused thoughtfully. “Like the humidity before a thunderstorm you didn’t expect, when the air is just about to cool and it feels electric when you breathe in, but soft, and quiet. Pre-storm.”

It didn’t feel entirely like a compliment, but her heart fluttered with the knowledge that they were connected in some way. They were meant to be together.

Joan paused at Wallace’s intersection and leaned around the side of a building, waiting for any sign of the Crimson Guard. The wind howled through the narrow street, whisking up the last of the snowsquall and pushed at the gas lamps, making the flames, what few were burning, flicker. Asha shivered well after they’d steadied.

Wallace Avenue was generally a place that gave her pause, reminding her that this part of the city was dangerous even for people that called it their home, but tonight, something felt more deeply sinister. It had started with Teddy’s blood on her feet and had only ballooned from there. She didn’t want to set foot on that road and planted her feet when Joan took her hand and tried to pull her forward.

“What are you doing, Asha?” Joan hissed.

“Something’s wrong.”

He searched her eyes. “What?”

“I don’t know.” She felt foolish with such an inadequate response, but her entire body was covered in goosebumps and her thoughts felt like confetti scattered by the wind. She couldn’t focus on anything.

“The sun’s coming up,” Joan responded. “We don’t have time for this.”

“Maybe…”

“Maybe we shouldn’t make sure you’re safe?” he cut in before she could voice any of her concerns. “Maybe we _should_ give you to the Crimson Guard? Is that what you want?”

She rolled her bottom lip between her teeth. “No.”

“No,” Joan agreed. “So, let’s go.” He didn’t take her hand this time when he marched out, but Asha followed him like they were tethered together.

Asha scoured every cranny for foes and realized something troubling. Not only could she not see the Crimson Guard, she couldn’t see _anyone._ The alleys were empty and so were the gutters. She listened for voices and heard nothing. She didn’t even smell cigarettes on the air as she normally would.

They came to the section of the street where people had pitched tents in the alleys and slept beneath once glorious awnings. Before the Dwarf Palace came to Ester and shifted its financial district, Wallace Avenue was the stock market hub. Abandonment had left room for the spiders to crawl in. Asha squinted, trying to spy someone loitering in the shadows but the only thing to see was more shadows.

Joan acted like he saw none of it, maintaining his purpose as he walked. Asha had to scurry to catch up or risk being left behind. She didn’t want to be on Wallace by herself for any amount of time.  Not tonight.

“Where do you think everyone went?” Her voice echoed, making painfully obvious there was no one to listen to it.

“Who cares?” was Joan’s response. In it, though, she could tell that he was disturbed. Somehow, that made her feel better.

As they got closer to the end of the street where it circled into a cul-de-sac, she saw more puzzling and troubling signs of abandonment. Vendor stalls were left vacant, their wares still on display. Fruits from far away lands, banned by the government for one reason or another, toys spelled to talk and walk, mimicking toy animator works. They were cheaper but the spells only lasted a quarter of the length of time than a professionally made one.

The most valuable thing Asha passed was a fur vendor’s stall, where he displayed rare and expensive furs and body parts—some from the odd endangered animal. There were scales that were a dark shade of burgundy, like fresh blood, that likely came from one of the mermaids in Scarlet Lake. Beside that was a massive claw that looked half-rotten that said _wyrm_ on a small square of paper in calligraphy handwriting, and then piles and piles of furs. Some of them were benign and perfectly legal, like beavers and raccoons and minks, but one stood out from the rest.

Asha dragged her fingers over the massive wolf hide and felt like she was touching a demigod, Amarog of Forest Father, or another of his great wolves descending from the north. A deep, deep chill settled in her bones.

She looked up and realized that Joan was far ahead of her now, his eyes focused on the great, billowing tent at the top of the cul-de-sac. While everywhere else looked abandoned, there were lights inside the tent, guttering every time the wind blew. The ominous feeling that drenched Wallace Avenue only grew. Asha wanted to call Joan back, but he was committed, stalking forward like a man marching towards something that scared him, but something inevitable.

Asha made her frozen feet move through the slushy snow, slipping and sliding, hurrying after Joan before he disappeared inside the tent. If there really was no way around this, she wanted to be beside him every step of the way.

She reached Joan’s side just as he tugged aside the tent flap, so she got the full brunt of the stench as he stepped inside. Rotten meat and yeast, maybe. Death, certainly. She held her breath so she wouldn’t gag but couldn’t do so forever. Eventually, she’d have to take in another bit of air and hoped she wouldn’t throw up on the dirt floor.

The tent flap slid closed behind her, blocking out the desolation of the street. Asha peered at everything she possibly could—there was a lot to take in.

The tent’s owner had built worktables from board so old and porous; she wasn’t sure how they held up under the jars and objects that cluttered them. There were tinctures of every colour on every surface imaginable, bits of animals that hung from the rafters, limp and less without the light of life in them. Bones were splayed out on one table near the back of the tent, dry and yellowed looking, and large. Too large to be a raccoon’s, but too small to be a bear’s.

There were pouches on thongs stuffed so full, they were near bursting. There were stones of every colour and every shape, every size. Somewhere on a shelf taller and narrower than Asha and some were scattered on the workbenches, hidden amongst other detritus.

There was jewellery and something that looked like tobacco and other fresh herbs, oils. There were even tarot cards on one table. Asha brushed her fingers over the stack and the deck slid, revealing the Three of Swords. The ends of each sword were stabbed through a heart so dark red, it looked as though it were painted in fresh blood.

Something black like sludgy oil seeped up from the ground, a spilling in reverse, and reached for Asha. The creature was shapeless and without eyes, but somehow, she knew it _saw_ her. It saw her more clearly than anyone had ever.

She turned on her heel before she could really process what she was doing and tried to escape. She ran into a squishy, stench-ridden form and stumbled back. Joan caught her under the arms and steadied her.

“Good, Mister Vealer, you’re just in time,” said a slippery voice. Asha followed it up and realized it was a body she’d collided with. A man’s body. Tall and willowy, he reminded her of a stock of Canary Reed Grass. The top of his head was hidden beneath a tall top hat. His skin was the brown of a roasted coffee bean where she could see it around his black suit, all except for his face. That, he’d painted bright white, in lines like a skull.

Despite the paint and the cocked hat, his face struck a chord in her.  She scoured her memory. It brought her back to the kitchen table, back when it was still summer, with Father Brant and his newspaper. There’d been a man on the front page. A Reverend. _Disgraced,_ the title had read, _and Disowned._ Cast out by his church for crimes against the children that went there. He’d been blinded, his eyes cut with heated knives, so he may never look at another child again, and left to the kindness of the streets.

His eyes were _not_ two slashes, as she knew them to be when he’d been convicted and sentenced in front of the congregation, but two white orbs, seeing right through her. How was it possible?

The man wore a half-cocked smile. “What do you see, God’s girl? Ghosts?”

Asha opened and closed her mouth. “Reverend Paul.”

He barked out a single chuckle. “Once, I suppose that’s what this man was called.”

Like he was someone new. She got nervous tingles in her fingers.

He continued, “The people in this part of the city have taken to calling me, _Bokor._ ” The word was foreign and strange. _Bo-kour_. “Do you know what Bokor means?” He paused, waiting for Asha to answer. She shook her head minutely. “Priest,” the man explained primly. “I’m quite fond of it, actually. It reminds me of what I used to be, long, long ago, and are we all not trying to recreate the past? The best versions of ourselves?”

His mouth and his voice moved out of synchronicity like his body had forgotten quite how to function. The teeth in his mouth were as black as Missus Watson’s, who’d died of lead poisoning in Father Brant’s infirmary five years before when they still fused the tops of cans with lead.

“Are you sick?” was all she could think to ask.

“Aren’t we all, in one way or another?” the man mused. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” His nails were too long. He drummed them on one of his workbenches, _tick, tick, tick, tick_. And again. “So I can make you better again?”

He had a way of speaking that made all his words seem true. Asha had to remember why they were there. “I’m not sick.”

“Not in the way men rotting from the pox are but in your own way, God’s girl. In your own way.”

Asha looked to Joan who stood by the Bokor’s workbench, eyeing the Bokor raptly. He wouldn’t meet Asha’s eyes. Asha looked back to the Bokor for answers. “What do you mean?”

The Bokor cocked his head so the candlelight skimmed down his sharp-as-a-knife cheekbone. “Your magic. Your magic is your sickness. It comes and goes in waves and is not always kind, is it?”

Diedre was in her thoughts again, spitting up what she’d eaten and falling into the mess. Her heart pulverized. Asha knew she was supposed to _heal_ people. She was supposed to _help_ them. But she’d broken a cardinal rule. Twice, possibly— _probably,_ because she didn’t think that guard died all on his own the night Joan robbed the Apothecary.

“I didn’t mean to,” she whispered.

“ _I_ know it,” the Bokor said. “Mister Vealer does, too, otherwise, you wouldn’t be here, would you? You’d be in a jail cell awaiting the King’s decree. That doesn’t change the fact that the military’s seen you, Miss Brant. It doesn’t change that they’re hungry for Heartbreakers. They want people with your exact skill.”

Heartbreakers. She’d never heard of the men and women the military recruited called that before. It _did_ make them seem wicked, but in that gentle way, where they were nice before things got bad. “For what?”

“I’m not omnipotent,” he said, but Asha doubted it. “Nor does it matter. All that matters is your magic makes you a valuable commodity. To them, you’re a diamond. I have a way to make you seem like ruff.” The shadows that nestled in the corners of the tent seemed to gather in as the Bokor spoke, nestling in at his feet and simmering like pets, waiting for his command. Asha tried to watch them closely but anytime she really focused on them, she couldn’t make heads or tails of what she was seeing. _Were_ the shadows moving, or was it just a trick of the wavering light?

“What do you get in return?” If there was one thing she’d learned in her life, it was that nothing was free. “Neither Joan or I have any money.” She would _not_ let him steal from the donation pot for this. She’d let him take too much.

“I don’t need money today,” the Bokor said. “I need you to pass along a message.”

It seemed simple enough. Asha tried to keep her suspicions up, though. She’d no interest in becoming an easy mark. “To who? And what message?”

“A young man will stumble into your path. He’ll require guidance. You’re to tell him my name in his most desperate hour and bring him to me so I may help him the way I’m going to help you.”

“That’s all?”

He held up his hands, doing his best impersonation of _ingenue_. “I swear to it.”

“You won’t hurt him?” She didn’t know this man, but she didn’t want to be the cause of any heartache.

“I’m here to _help_ people, God’s girl,” he said in a way that didn’t sound at all ironic to Asha. _Or maybe you don’t want to see the lion in the trees,_ she thought. _Maybe you want this badly enough to believe._ Which was possible. She’d looked the other way a time or two, she knew, feigned ignorance because she _wanted_ to be ignorant. It was true what they said—there was bliss in it.

“I’ll tell him if she won’t.”

Asha startled to hear Joan’s voice; she’d almost forgotten he was there.

The Bokor had been digging through Asha with his pale as moonstone eyes. He lifted them to Joan, and it was like a weight was gone from Asha’s shoulders. She could breathe easier. “This is for Miss lovely Asha Brant, Mister Vealer. You cannot take the onus on you; you cannot fight her battles.

He was right. And Asha didn’t _want_ Joan to fight her battles, either. It was enough that he came into this haunted part of the slums and found this ghost of a man for her. This man that smelled like death and courted shadows, this man with secrets and power.

“We’re running thin on time,” the Bokor said, looking at the side of his tent as though he could see through it to where the sun was quickly approaching the horizon. “What is your answer, God’s girl?”

Asha looked back at Joan. He wore an agonized expression, as though this was the most important thing to him and the only thing standing in his way was her uncertainty.

Asha looked away from him; she didn’t want to be hasty or foolish. “Will I still be able to use my magic?”

“Certainly.” The Bokor’s mouth lifted into a smile, stretching his painted-on teeth over his real ones. “I imagine you’ll need it yet.”

He spoke as though that were another premonition. Asha worried her lip. “Will someone be hurt?”

“A fortune-telling will cost you extra and we are almost out of time.” The Bokor stepped back, further into the shadows, as though it hurt him to be under a lightening sky. “What is your answer?” His voice was like a piece of cloth unravelling at the seams, two-toned and frayed in spots. Shadows bubbled around his feet and lifted up his legs. They almost whispered. “Will you be a slave to the military, or will you be free for the simple cost of delivering a message?”

_It’s only a message. This man, once he hears it, is free to make his own decisions._ “I will be able to walk the streets again? Without fear of being caught?” Asha asked.

“Without question.” He was looking impatient, making Asha feel rushed. She tried to think of consequences for her actions but couldn’t strum any up.

“Just do it, Asha,” Joan encouraged. “We’ll worry about the rest afterward. Together.”

_Together._ She liked the sound of that. They couldn’t have a _together_ if she was taken by the Crimson Guard. “Fine,” she heard herself say. “I agree. I’ll deliver your message and you’ll protect me from the Crimson Guard.”

The Bokor grinned wider than ever—unnaturally so. No man’s face should ever stretch that far. He lifted his hand and summoned her close, into the envelopes of shadows, where the candlelight couldn’t quite reach. Asha’s heart squeezed as she stepped forward, into a coldness that surrounded her like late-night mist.

The Bokor grabbed her hand in his dark-skinned one and squeezed her wrist tightly. His skin was clammy and cold like a fish’s, and slippery, too. Asha was once again overcome with the urge to _run_. There was no way of breaking the Bokor’s hold, though. He held her as tightly as a fox trap.

“Don’t be afraid. Don’t fight. And close your eyes,” the Bokor suggested.

But he was pulling a knife from _somewhere_ and the candlelight was glinting off the rusty blade, and Asha couldn’t, not for anything, look away.

The Bokor seemed to get bigger. The shadows behind him elongated and got dark and transformed from the shape of a man into something freakish and unidentifiable. It had many legs, curved like the sickle Father Brant used to use on the church’s rosebushes and lingered in Asha’s mind like a nightmare.

The Bokor’s very essence changed. He vibrated with power and dissonance. His grip on her arm tightened further and Asha realized she’d again been struggling to get away. He laid his knife against her skin. The blade was cool and sharp, and she could practically feel the history seeping out of it. It had cut better flesh than hers and worse. She was nothing. A means to an end. Small and insignificant in the eyes of this god-like monster. And that was relieving, in a way. It was good not to be in the spotlight. She could slink away unnoticed once her part was through.

Asha relaxed just as the blood started flowing down her arm. The candles sputtered as a gust of wind snuck through the tent flap. The shadows whispered more comprehensively now. They were chattering for blood. Longing for purpose.

The Bokor hummed as he worked, an ancient tune that made the hairs on the back of Asha’s neck stand on end. His voice peaked and the wind gusted harder. One by one the candles extinguished but the shadows never faded. Two of them detached from the wall and like two of the Bokor’s vestigial appendages, slid into the slit in Asha’s arm and started pulling either side of the fresh wound apart.

Asha gritted her teeth against the pain. Blood soaked the floor beneath her and was drunk down by creatures she couldn’t see but could _feel._ The whispering turned into moaning, agonizing and sharp, like the sound the wounded and sick would make before Asha could heal them.

The Bokor brought a small chunk of layered black stone to her skin. It glittered like mica but looked like shale and when it touched her, it was as cold as ice. Asha struggled despite herself. She would have fallen but suddenly, Joan was behind her, pushing his chest to her back and keeping her steady. _Trapped._

The Bokor worked quickly after that, pushing the stone into the wound and swiping his hand through the blood, making trails over Asha’s arm. Most of it disappeared and she didn’t understand to _where_ at first, but then the shadows around him got bigger and blacker and more defined, like plants drinking sunlight.

The Bokor held her wound beneath his palm, still chanting. Cold slithered over her. Her lungs seized up; she couldn’t breathe. Then her arm began to burn. Not just her arm, her entire body, like she was being dipped in hot wax, inch by inch. Asha writhed. Joan tightened his hold on her, whispering to her things that she couldn’t possibly hear over the thump of her heart and the Bokor’s unending chants and the wind’s growl.

She saw eyes in the shadows on the tent wall and couldn’t look away from them—eyes, opening all at once and _looking at her_ , large, of various shapes and colours. One pair stood out from the rest. They were the blue of northern ice and familiar. She’d seen them staring her down one night not so long ago, when she’d been running through the field, trying to escape the Crimson Guard’s mages. The Captain of the Guard had a pair just like them.

Just as suddenly as the eyes had opened, the Bokor slashed his hand through them and they closed. They couldn’t see her. They were blind.

The Bokor’s chanting wound down, getting quieter and quieter until he was whispering and then he was silent. The wind died and the shadows got quiet and all Asha could hear was Joan’s breathing against her ear.

The Bokor released her arm; she had a thick bruise from wrist to elbow but she couldn’t feel the pain. “There you go, God’s girl. It’s everything you’ve ever wanted. You’re invisible.” He smiled wryly.

“I’ll—” Asha had to clear her throat and try again; her mouth was as dry as a cotton ball. “I’ll be able to walk the street without setting off the Captain of the Guard’s stone thing?” She didn’t _feel_ much different. Her arm was burning a bit but when she touched it, there wasn’t even a lump of stone. It was like it’d melted through her. She hoped it would be okay.

The Bokor assured, “You could dance in front of him and he’d never know you’re magic. I don’t advise it, though. You’re lovely, but to him, you’ll now be a gutter rat with no worth and our Captain of the Guard seems to have a temper.”

“Thank you,” Asha said after a moment because that’s what you were supposed to do when someone did you a service as large as this one. She couldn’t help but feel as though she’d made a deal with a devil, though. _It’s a small price and how can there be repercussions for passing along a message?_ Asha held her head high. “This man—the one I’m supposed to pass along a message for?”

“Yes?” the Bokor drawled.

“How will I know him?”

“Death follows him,” the Bokor responded. Like a dog followed you home, his tone said, but Asha suspected it was more menacing than that. Like chaos followed natural disasters.

Something moved beneath the skin on the Bokor’s shiny cheek. A worm, or something worse. He looked paler all of a sudden. And wet. Asha took a step back. The floor of the tent felt all at once uneven. It hadn’t been that way when she came in.

“The sun is coming, God’s girl.” The Bokor’s voice bubbled and cracked. “You should run along.” The side of the tent behind the Bokor sagged and then collapsed like a lung under great pressure, folding to the ground. There was a dead mink hanging to dry on one of the rafters. It fell unceremoniously to the earthen floor. The floor that was now turning black with shadows. “Before you can’t.”

Asha took another step back. Joan was with her, holding her hand as tight as a vice. She thought she couldn’t move, watching the Bokor lose his solidity and sink into whatever pit it was he sunk into when the sun came out, but all around her, the tent started to fold in on itself and she realized if she didn’t _move,_ she’d be trapped with him and she didn’t know if he was going to a place she could survive. Or if he’d let her.

Spinning on her heel, she raced for the exit. It was an upwards climb now. Everything was sinking down, down. Tinctures were rattling off workbenches and candles were tipping and extinguishing like it was a foldable funhouse and not a tent full of valuables.

Asha was suddenly climbing _up._ She dug her nails into the ground to gain purchase.

The exit was just a slit, occasionally open to the pink sky as the first rays of sun poked over the horizon. Joan clambered for it, moving faster than Asha. Then he was through the gap and gone. Asha scrabbled after him for it and for a moment, she thought she wouldn’t make it. The angle was too steep. Frustrated and scared tears pricked her eyes. There was a wailing coming from behind her and the scrape of claws on earth. Something unseen slopped wetly. She was _sure_ there was a beast with its maw open wide sitting beneath her and she was going to be eaten. Then Joan’s hand poked through and grabbed her arm. He yanked her out with so much force, Asha fell.

She lay where she was for a minute, breathing heavily and shivering. She could just see Joan’s legs in her periphery. He was also quivering. It was a wonder he was standing at all.

The top of the sun crested the horizon and blazed through old buildings. It touched Asha and gave her the courage to look over her shoulder to see the Bokor’s tent, but it was gone, sunken into the earth. The only indication that it’d been there at all was the square-shaped blanket of moonflower poking up through a fresh layer of snow. Their leaves were impossibly green and their stalks proud, faces pointed to the sky. She touched one just to be certain she was seeing what she thought she was. The leaf was waxy and springy and not at all frostbitten, though it was _cold_ and had been for weeks.

A black tendril slithered from between the green stalks and touched Asha’s wrist. It felt like a wasp’s sting and left a welt twice as big when she yelled and pulled away. The tendril got pale and then slumped back to wherever it was it’d come from.

Joan took her elbow and used it to help her up. “Let’s get out of here.”

Asha didn’t argue as she wobbled out beside Joan, but she _did_ watch the moonflower patch for as long as she possibly could, thinking about slithery little monsters that hid in the places you couldn’t see.


	8. Chapter 8

Asha watched the sun sink from her windowsill and imagined stepping out beneath the navy sky. It gave her chills. She told herself it was because the Crimson Guard came out at night and she didn’t want to test the limits of the Bokor’s magic unnecessarily, but when she closed her eyes, it wasn’t the Captain’s icy blues she saw peering at her, it was the Bokor’s moonstone white and the darkness he kept at his side, the creatures that saw without eyes. Her greatest benefactor was simultaneously her greatest horror.

Joan wasn’t as conflicted when he came to her an hour later, sweating and twitching, _wanting_ his fix, and though Asha begged him not to venture back to the slums in the dark, he did anyway. Shadows folded around him and took him from view.

Several times, when the moon would come out from the clouds and shine as bright as a pearl, Asha almost felt brave. She would put on her coat and race down the stairs, but when she threw open the door and looked at the expansive night and imagined all the monsters it could hide, she was paralyzed. A tree croaked in the wind and she was reminded of the dry clatter inside the Bokor’s tent as it was folding into the ground. Into nothing. And trying to take her with it.

She retreated into the church’s drafty vestibule and waited Joan out there.

Joan returned just before dawn, hazy-eyed and stumbling. Asha tried to be furious with him, but she was so happy to see him, the anger just sort of fizzled out. He reported everything in the slums was as it’d been. People were back in their stalls and their tents and on their corners, and no one said a thing about the night the streets went dark and empty. Teddy’s mutilated body stayed out of the newspapers, too. Asha scoured for days afterwards.

People continued to go missing from the slums, but no one seemed to care. It was like no one minded it happening if the missing persons were those that grossed below the lower-middle class. It was frustrating. But Asha also couldn’t help but feel relieved. It wasn’t her being wiped off the face of the earth. She told herself her lack of empathy was because Father Brant, Bjorn and Joan needed her, but she knew it was selfish at its core. She didn’t want to totally disappear. Not like the Bokor said.

Bjorn was quiet for the latter half of winter, which Asha suspected was normal after you threatened and then buried someone you thought you could have, maybe, loved as much as you hated, but his quietness moved into spring and then summer and morphed into something perilous. He scowled more and when he wasn’t scowling, he was drunk or stoned. He’d stay out all night and sometimes, he’d come back with deep bruises on his face and his knuckles would be torn open. She wanted to ask him what was going on, but Bjorn wasn’t the kind of person you just casually asked a question like that.

It wasn’t until July when she had a minute confrontation with him.

She was staring at her ceiling, wondering if it could look back at her when she heard the front door of the church open and Bjorn’s heavy footfalls on the stairs. She listened for Joan’s, too, but Bjorn was alone. It was such an unusual occurrence, Asha found herself investigating. Her head felt cobwebby. She hadn’t been sleeping as much as she should. Couldn’t. Not if she didn’t want to be plagued by pale slimy monsters hiding in the dark.

Bjorn was banging around in his room. She was extra quiet going to him as if her overcompensation would make up for his lack of courtesy.

Asha pushed open his door gently and peered inside. He’d lit his oil lamp; it’s light made shadows on the floor.

Bjorn’s back was to her. He was soaked in sweat and there was blood down the side of his face; she could see it when he turned his cheek.

“You’re hurt.” Asha invited herself in with her hand outstretched. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do with it. Bjorn would never accept a healing and he wasn’t the kind of man to let people fawn over him.

Bjorn turned and looked at her for so long, it was uncomfortable. She let her hand drop limply to her side. The blood leaked from a gash under his very swollen eye. His lip was torn, too, though that seemed to have stopped bleeding. She had no idea what he was thinking or feeling, or if he was just going to stare at her and not say a damned thing.

Then she noticed the bag in his hands. “What are you doing?”

This, Bjorn seemed better equipped to answer. “Moving out.”

The notion was so absurd, Asha could only say, “What?”

Bjorn started moving again. He grabbed clothes from the beat-up dresser someone, long ago, had donated to the church and threw them into the bag haphazardly.

Asha tried another question. “Where are you going to go?”

Bjorn answered without looking at her. “I have a place on Rose.”

Her favourite place in the city. It wasn’t the nicest by far, nor was it the most expensive, but it still cost money that she didn’t think Bjorn had. “How are you going to pay for it?”

Another question he’d never answer. He pushed the last of his clothes into his bag and fought with the zipper. It was overflowing. He wasn’t coming back for anything, not if he could help it, that bag seemed to say.

“Why are you doing this?” Asha begged, chasing him down the hallway.

“Because I can.”

“But Father Brant—”

Bjorn easily outpaced her; he was so much taller. “He’s your burden, Asha. Fuck off.”

That hit her like a stone in the chest. “He took care of us.”

Bjorn turned on her. He looked dangerous in the glow of the moon. Not in the way the Bokor had been, unknown and eerie, but in a way uniquely Bjorn’s. Violent and unpredictable and familiar. He’d looked at Diedre similarly. “And now he’s fucking dead, or good enough.”

Asha stepped back with the force of his words.

“I’m done in this graveyard,” said Bjorn. “If you’re smart, you’ll figure a way out, too.” And then he was gone, down the stairs and out the door and Asha wasn’t brave enough to follow, afraid of Bjorn and the Bokor and one hundred other things she didn’t have names for.

She retreated up the stairs and turned out Bjorn’s light, then checked on Father Brant. He was in his bed, as still as the dead. She hated Bjorn for the image he put in her head and herself for enforcing it. Damn him.

She refused to check if Father Brant was breathing; it felt like a betrayal.

She closed the door and went back to her room. Sleep was even further away now. She sat on her windowsill and looked out over the graveyard. It’d been fascinating when she was a kid—the dead had never scared her; it was the living that required watching—but now it was too damn quiet. It was just her and her thoughts. And then movement between the headstones.

Joan stumbled out. He could have been drunk or high, but he hunched over his middle as he zagged past crooked headstones and Asha knew something was wrong. Nerves made her fingers twinge uncomfortably. She rose. Her foot was numb after being stuck beneath her body for so long.

She opened her door and took the stairs as quickly and quietly as she could. The moon had moved behind a cloud and the church was pitch black. She knew it off by heart, however, and didn’t need its assistance.

Asha went through the heart of the church to get to the back. The empty pews and dais looked poised, waiting for parishioners to fill them. She didn’t look at the Saviour as she passed him; recently, it felt like he watched her with judgement. She was no longer pure with the Bokor’s touch in her blood. She wasn’t _God’s girl._ She was just Asha Brant, and Asha Brant left a lot to be desired.

Sticky summer air crashed into Asha as she pushed open the back door. Crickets croaked and beneath that noise, she could hear laboured breaths. She followed the sound left, to where the gravestones were tall and worn down by the elements. There was Joan, leaning heavily on the statue of an angel. He held his ribs and leaned over. Asha’s panic crashed over her. She raced to him and grabbed him around the shoulders.

“What’s wrong? What’s happening?”

Joan retched. His knuckles were black and so was his jaw. His eyes were pinched in pain and his breaths were wet and strenuous. It looked like he’d been trampled by a horse.

Asha turned off her fear of the night and pulled Joan to the ground. He mostly fell and then he just lay there, wheezing breath in, wheezing breath out. There was blood at the corner of his mouth, and he was coughing up more. Asha closed her eyes and felt for her magic. She hadn’t had to use it since her visit with the Bokor. Had been afraid to, in case it ruined his spell, or it tied her to him in some way she couldn’t understand, but all that went out the window now. All that mattered was Joan was okay.

She knew Joan’s body as well as she knew her own, so it was easier to look inside him and assess the damage. His ribs were broken, two in two places, and they were puncturing his lungs. That’s where the blood was coming from.

Asha reached inside his tissue with her mind and moved the offending pieces of bone. Joan screamed. Without opening her eyes, Asha clamped her hand over his mouth to keep him silent. Her concentration was pertinent. She’d never done _this_ kind of healing before. The bullet wound she’d fixed for him had been relatively clean; this was a jagged mess of tissue and bone.

Joan’s sobs quieted and Asha focused intently to make the bone knit. It popped and Joan winced and then it was whole again. She moved onto the next break. That one was worse. It took longer to manipulate, and it made her head spin.

She pushed through and felt for his punctured lung—the most important bit. It was a ratty hole and the blood oozed out of it like sap from a milkweed. She knitted the skin together and encouraged his body to absorb the excess blood like she’d watched a freelance doctor do once in the Gold District. She’d been hidden behind one of the buildings, just people watching, and hadn’t expected a stabbing, but Ester could be rough even in its nice parts when the desperate tried to prey upon the rich. She’d learned all she could from her vantage point and now she was glad she’d stuck around.

Joan’s wet breaths got soft, and then they got quiet. He’d been squeezing her arm, Asha realized, bruising her to keep himself silent. He released her now and let all his muscles go loose. Asha used the sleeve of her shirt to wipe the blood away from his mouth.

“Thank you,” Joan croaked.

She struggled to find her voice. “What happened?”

He turned his head so he could see her properly. His eyes were dark and turning vacant; it’s what he did to lie to her. She’d already backed down for Bjorn once tonight, though.

“Don’t even think of lying to me. Not tonight.”

Joan glanced away. “Just a fight.”

“With Bjorn?” she said, remembering Bjorn’s cut face and black knuckles.

Joan sighed through his nose. “It’s not what you think.”

“Is there another thing _to_ think?” Asha’s voice was inching high.

“We weren’t fighting for real.” Joan reached to push her hair back from her face.

“Silly me, I thought those two broken ribs were serious.” She was still woozy and when she pushed his reaching hand aside, she nearly fell back into the graveyard.

“They were. But the fight was for show, Asha.”

She side-eyed him. “What do you mean?”

Silence, in which Asha looked at him stubbornly and Joan fidgeted. She’d never seen him fidget before. It made her nervous.

“Do you know Leb Rockcress?” Joan said at last.

“Should I?”

He shrugged. “He sells knockoff prescriptions for a pharmacist in the Aes sometimes.” Aes was the northern slang for slums. “He met up with Bjorn through Diedre and they hit it off. He invited him to this gig he’s got.”

Asha got more and more anxious at the mention of Diedre. The dead should stay dead in every form. “What. Gig?”

Joan looked at her quickly before dropping his eyes. “He’s been fighting. For money.”

Truthfully, she wasn’t all that surprised. Bjorn’s sour moods and his bruises, the late nights and the bags under his eyes, added up. Joan, though… He was different than Bjorn. At least, she used to think so. Just then, he was almost a stranger, staring back at her.

“You fight, too?” She knew but she wanted to hear him say it.

“Sometimes.”

“ _Why_?”

“You don’t like it when I take money from the donation box.”

And he needed to, his tone said. He couldn’t help it.

Angry tears pressed against her eyes. She swallowed them down. Joan was broken when she collected him. She’d known that. Glossy pills and glossy eyes and pretty lies. She knew it and she loved him. Maybe _for_ it. She’d never had anyone that cared about her enough to lie to her.

“When do you stop?”

“I don’t know.”

Another lie. He had no intention of stopping.

“You can’t keep fighting.” He wasn’t small by any means, his limbs long and wiry, but people like Bjorn fought in groups like that, and Bjorn wasn’t anything like Joan. He was thick and he was mean, and he was merciless.

“Joan,” Asha said when he looked away. “Bjorn is supposed to be your friend and he _left_ you like this.” And he would keep doing it. She needed him to _see_ that. Bjorn cared about Bjorn and that was _it,_ no matter how much she wished otherwise.

“I told him I was good, not to hold back.”

A strangled laugh snuck out. “That’s good. Nice, even. Really, really good of him to just crack some of your ribs and puncture your lungs. What’s the next guy going to do? Maybe he’ll kill you. But that’s fine because you can handle it.”

Joan pushed her hair back again, and brushed a tear aside, too, and this time, Asha let him. “It’s okay.”

Not just the fighting, but the dying? She couldn’t ask for clarification. “Nothing about this is okay.”

He took in a noisy breath, held it, while he puzzled through the situation. He lit up. “Then help me.”

“What?”

He sat up on his elbow. “Just listen. Corporis mages can alter bodies, yeah?”

“So what?”

“ _Muscles,_ Asha,” he said when he realized she didn’t understand. “I’ve seen it. They can make people faster and stronger. We can win more. And when we win more, we get more money, yeah?”

“ _I_ don’t need more money,” Asha said adamantly.

He went in for the kill. “Don’t you want to take care of Father Brant? He’s getting sicker. There’re healing crystals that can help with his memory and they’re more expensive than the church can afford. We’ll split our profits if you help me.”

He knew just how to get under her skin. Asha tried to stay rational. “What if someone finds out?”

“No one will. How can they?”

“It’ll be suspicious if you’re always winning.”

“Then I won’t always win. You’ll fix me up.”

He’d come back to her looking as he had tonight. Asha pressed her hands against her eyes. “Don’t ask me.” And he didn’t. But eventually, the moon began to sink, and Joan didn’t tell her he’d stop, and Asha began mulling over his words.

* * *

 

She went to his next fight. Followed him without ever telling him it was her intention because _she_ didn’t know it was her intention.

It was held at the old mill. Joan fought a man named Graham that was twice his size and lost as miserably as Asha had ever seen _anyone_ lose. As soon as she saw him in the dirt, bloody and ragged, she knew she was going to help him. She couldn’t _not._

When the bouncers pulled him out of the ring and dropped him in a darkened corner, she went to him and healed the worst of his wounds, careful to leave the bruising as it was so no one would get too suspicious. Bjorn stood at the other end of the mill’s property and didn’t try to come over at all. Normally, that would have stung but Asha was praying he’d stay put and mind his own business.

She went to the library the next day and sat in one of the dusty, dark corners reading all she could on Corporis magic. It wasn’t much, but enough for her to clasp at the basic concepts of body augmentation.

Anytime the library door would open, she would retreat into the shadows and hold her breath, praying that no one would recognize her or question her reading material, but it was like she was invisible. Like the Bokor’s magic _worked_.

She decided to test her theory with an academic, staying where she was when he entered the library and came to her section. She watched him sort through books on magic for an entire hour. He didn’t even look at her.

Maybe all this fear really was worth something.

They practiced in the nights to follow, Asha trying to augment Joan’s body and Joan gritting his teeth through the process. It was more painful than she’d imagined it would be. Trying to bulk him up some, she knotted his bicep so badly, he cramped on the floor for twenty minutes, sucking in agonized breaths and chewing a hole in his cheek.

“Keep trying,” Joan told her when she sat back wet-eyed and frustrated. There was blood on his teeth.

It took an entire two weeks and two lost fights for Asha to become successful, and not even gloriously so. She managed to make Joan just a touch faster. But it was enough, so when he was facing his opponent in the ring—another guy taller, stronger and meaner than he was—he was quick enough to dodge and hit and _win_.

Bjorn hadn’t spoken to Joan since he broke his ribs—Asha was certain he was ashamed—but after Joan’s second win, Bjorn broke his silence. He crossed the ring holding a wet cloth and handed it to him. “Good work, brother.” He barely looked at Asha.

Joan wiped the sweat and blood from his face. “Thanks.”

“Want to party?”

Joan grinned grotesquely. Weeks of silence didn’t bother him the way they’d bothered Asha. “Yeah.”

Bjorn clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

Asha prepared herself to walk home on her own, but Joan took her hand and they went together. Bjorn looked back once. His expression clouded like he was going to refuse her, but he didn’t say anything.

They meandered through Ester’s twining streets. It was easier to be beneath the darkened sky when she had Joan and Bjorn at her side. She only thought of the Bokor and his writhing shadows a little while Bjorn and Joan talked animatedly about Joan’s fight. If she didn’t look toward Wallace Avenue and its barrel fires flickering against the skyline, she was good.

They turned onto Lexie Street. Asha was surprised to see Bjorn head for the abandoned factory. “Why are we going here?”

Bjorn scowled. She prepared herself for silence, but he said, “It’s a good place.”

For anyone that wanted to hide.

He ducked through the hole in the wall. Asha followed. There was a lamp burning low by the far wall. A person sat in front of it. Asha felt her stomach twist. Then she got closer and realized she recognized that person.

Necia was sitting on a blanket spread on the ground. Bjorn’s. Asha knew its quilted pattern—a parishioner had knitted it for Bjorn for his fourteenth birthday.

Necia had cut her hair again. The red locks were brushed over her forehead and her freckles stood out by the firelight. She was in a low-cut patchwork dress she could have made herself.

Asha remembered the last time they’d hung out together. She thought they might have been friends but after the incident on Wallace Avenue with Teddy, and then Diedre, she didn’t know. How much did Necia know, or suspect? And what did she think of it? Had she told Bjorn?

Necia grinned when she saw Asha. Asha saw no suspicion or hatred in her eyes. “Hey!” Her words were slightly slurred. “Asha!”

The knot in Asha’s chest loosened. “Hey, Necia.”

Necia patted the ground. “Come sit with me.”

Asha hesitated.

“Come on.”

Bjorn was still in deep conversation with Joan. It was like he’d forgotten she was there. Invisible Asha. She stepped away from them and joined Necia on the blanket. It was musty and beside it was a pile of Bjorn’s clothes. He was sleeping there. How long had this been going on and what happened to the place on Rose Boulevard? Did it ever exist? She knew better than to ask outright; she wouldn’t get an answer. Or if she did, it’d be full of contempt.

Necia took a glass pipe from a bag at her side and stuffed it full of silvery leaves. Then she lit it. Bitter smoke filled the empty space. Necia handed it to Asha but Asha passed. She didn’t know what it was or what it would do to her. Joan took it, though. She felt betrayed for a reason she couldn’t quite place when she saw him smoking it. It made her feel helpless and more than a little frustrated but knew that people like Joan and Bjorn were alike in a few critical ways. They were driven by vice and stubbornness. If she told him to stop, or even _asked_ , he’d drift further away from her. So, she kept silent and thought of the ways she could get him to stop, eventually. He would, wouldn’t he? He loved her. That’s what it meant when he took her to the Bokor. People sacrificed for love.

She would.

* * *

 

It was another three weeks of that routine, augmenting Joan, watching his fights while chewing her nails down to the bed, healing him, and then returning to the factory to celebrate with Bjorn and Necia.

Bjorn mostly ignored Asha, much more interested in Necia. She was hot and cold with him; Asha suspected that’s why he was always next to her, trying to crack her open and see what made her tick. Necia seemed to love the attention; she’d forgotten Bjorn was the man they’d watched beating down Diedre’s door with the intention of shooting her in the face—or she liked that intensity in him like Asha sometimes did. She was difficult to read.

In early August, when Joan was making tons of money and they were burning through it all with just as much efficiency, Bjorn announced that he’d be helping Leb organize the fights. Bjorn, Necia and Joan celebrated in the dinge of the factory while Asha sat on the fringe, watching them as though she was separate, dreading what was coming. She felt Joan slip away from her faster and faster. Sometimes, he stayed with Bjorn at the factory and ignored her. Sometimes, he’d flip completely and give her all his attention all at once and she’d remember why she loved him. The money for Father Brant never came, though. He’d tell her _next fight,_ and she’d believe him. She knew she was going to have to accept that it wasn’t coming. Eventually.

She mostly forgot about the Bokor—or at least pushed him to the back of her mind. Until, one night in the dregs of August, Necia towed a man through the gap in the factory.

He was tall but not at all lanky. His muscles were corded and tight like knots in a boat line. He was larger than even Bjorn and exuded a desperateness that reminded her of the sick she’d heal, the ones grasping for that last breath.

Death lingered in the corners of his eyes, settled at the edges of his mouth. And it was like she thought, chaos edging after a natural disaster, sickly and dark. Without question, this was the man the Bokor wanted her to send his way.

She almost leapt to attention and blurted out the Bokor’s demands when Necia introduced her. She kept it together, just barely. She needed to see the extent of his trouble to satisfy her own curiosity.

His name was Caden. He was local, though Asha had never seen him before, which meant he didn’t live in the part of town she did. He was in a suit, too. One that came from money. It was nicely tailored and well kept—or it had been until he started crawling through the dusty factory with them.

He didn’t talk about himself and drank most of the night, running, running, running from whatever ghosts chased him, pretending like he wasn’t going to look back. But Asha knew the truth. Everyone always did, and Caden was no exception.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys,  
> This is the final chapter of Smoke and Fire, the novella length prequel to the Abolition of Caden Hail. Thank you anyone who took the time to read it or recommend it to your friends, you're stars. If you liked it, please pledge to my patreon for more stories like this, or pick up The Reformation of Linnea Hail (JUST RELEASED!) and the Abolition of Caden Hail, from Amazon!  
> Thanks so much for being awesome :)  
> Kaitlin


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